360970 - Add 'New mail' and 'No New Mail' notifications (Dialogs)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Penelope Graveyard :: General, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Matt Dudziak]

From the Wiki:
I'd also like the return of a feature that was lost somewhere along the way. When I click 'Check for Messages'. I'd like the program to tell me explicity when I have no new messages so I know when it is finished checking. If this is a problem for scripts or other mechanisms that implement an auto-check feature, perhaps the 'no mail' notification could be a user-selectable option.

Penelope should have a user-selectable option to display dialogs (or other visual indicator) that there is new mail or 'No new mail'. Vote for this bug if you agree.

Comment 1

[David Morrison]

This has changed over the years. The ideal from my perspective (and I think it used to be like this) is that for manual checks for new mail, it tells you that there is no new mail. If it is an automatic check, then it doesn't.

Comment 2

[Roberta Millstein]

I'd be more interested in the program telling me when it was done filtering, especially since filtering has gotten slower from what it used to be.  (Of course, the ideal would be faster filtering...)

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Dialogs as notification are a bad idea; the user should not have to do something to clear the notification, even if the Check New Mail action was triggered by user action.  (And a dialog explicitly means "require the user to do something.")  The slide-up alert that Thunderbird uses is OK, altho I'm not fond of the new verbose style of that window, and I don't think it's a particularly useful concept for the "new new messages" case.  Notification of "no new messages" in the status bar would be OK.

I don't know what Penelope's account-display is going to look like, but assuming there are visible items for each account (like in the Mozilla folder pane), you could put a throbber-style icon on each node while a new-mail check is active.

Comment 4

[Gavin Lambert]

(In reply to comment #1)
> This has changed over the years. The ideal from my perspective (and I think it
> used to be like this) is that for manual checks for new mail, it tells you that
> there is no new mail. If it is an automatic check, then it doesn't.

That's how my current (Windows) Eudora behaves, and that's how I'd expect Penelope to behave too.

Two simple rules it should follow (which Eudora already does):
1. When doing an automatic background check, stay out of my way -- don't present the new mail until I've finished doing whatever I was doing.
2. When doing a manual check, tell me when you're done.  And make it as much in my face as possible.

Comment 5

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Penelope didn't see any activity in the vcs for the last 8 years, closing.