12007 - Ability to select messages according to criteria.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

Once upon a time, there was a feature in the Win 3.x file manager that allowed
you to select a bunch of files based on a wildcarded filename.  This was very
useful to me, but it seemed to go away with Win95.

It would be good to have similar functionality with Mozilla, to select
messages.  The benefit of this is that you can select messages based on some
criteria, then perform some sort of action on them.

The panel to choose what messages to select can reuse the panel in the mail
filters that does the same thing.

There are a variety of different ways you could handle folders.

You might allow selection in the UI, or selection in the popup with the
currently selected folder as default.  You might allow selection of multiple
folders, or one and optionally its subfolders.

It would also be nice if you could choose between: add these to selection,
remove these from the selection, set these to the selection and toggle these in
the selection, too.  This can to a degree be achieved by and/or, but this
doesn't allow manual intervention between two uses of this action.

An alternative to this last bit would be to provide a row "already selected",
purely for this action only, not filters.  If the selection panel stayed the
same as in 4.x, this would make non-replace selection options a little harder,
but still quite doable.

Comment 1

[Phil Peterson]

Help wanted, m15, later

Comment 2

[Phil Peterson]

Reopen mail/news HELP WANTED bugs and reassign to [e-mail]

Comment 3

[Phil Peterson]

Put HELP WANTED in the Status Whiteboard so the mozilla.org bug query finds them

Comment 4

[Jesse Ruderman]

You can perform basic actions on messages (move, delete) from the search dialog.
 I think a "select according to criteria" dialog wouldn't be very useful, and it
would be too easy to lose the selection after closing the dialog.

In the rare case that you need to 
- perform a complex action (otherwise you would just use search) 
- on a set of messages meeting multiple criteria (otherwise you would sort and
use shift+select) 
- from a huge folder (otherwise you would make the selection manually), 
use search and create a new folder to temporarily hold the messages while you do
stuff to them.

Comment 5

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/a9f962ae2ee5
[fenix] For https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12007: Follow ux mock on Settings --> Search screen (https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/pull/12177)
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/e55a2499ad66
[fenix] For https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12007: Fix add search engine items using wrap content for height