Open Bug 1908599 Opened 1 year ago Updated 22 days ago

Hide emails for some time

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, enhancement)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Untriaged
Type:
enhancement

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
UNCONFIRMED

People

(Reporter: eduardp, Unassigned)

References

Details

Attachments

(3 files)

message tagged "hidden"
110.32 KB, image/png
Details
create custom view
61.26 KB, image/png
Details
use the custom view
221.27 KB, image/png
Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/128.0

Steps to reproduce:

This is a proposal.

Actual results:

If someone, like I do, do not move emails from the inbox until they have been replied properly, that creates some noise in the inbox.
It would be extremely useful to have a "Hide until tomorrow" option in the email options, so you can get rid of messages that cannot be replied yet.

Expected results:

Same that you can flag an email as "Favorite", "Spam" or Tag it. It could have a field named : HideUntil where you could set a timestamp. That hidden message would not show up in the inbox except if you filter it in.
This way, you could easily go through all your messages on the Inbox deciding which ones you should reply and which ones you should hide a given time (4 hours, a day, tomorrow, next week).
Right now those messages that are not dealt with yet remains in the same place that those that have to be dealt with resulting in the user reading again and again messages that cannot be handled. That is tiring and somewhat avoidable with the HideUntil field.

Bonus: THAT would be a property that no other email client have (that I am aware of), and a very useful one! So Thunderbird could have a unique feature!!!

How would you revert your decision if you want a hidden email to be shown again?

This sounds like a lot of non-obvious error-prone code conmplexity for little gain... :-/

This sounds a little bit like asking for a Todo list, or other Calendar-related feature; e.g. to perform an action at a specific date.

Have you looked at TB's Organise — Convert to — Event/Task feature, to see if that allows you to create per-email todo list that might allow something similar to your request?

HI,
Thanks for taking into consideration my proposal.
I reply first to Andre:
a) There would be a fast filter to filter in and out Hidden Messages. In fact, I imagine that button would be used very often. There would also be a column on the folder list so you can order your messages by Hidden Until.
I have never used such a feature in any email client, as I am not aware such an email client exists, so I cannot be certain of it. Yet I assume the workflow would be something like:

  1. Go through all new messages (as you normally do) and delete/archive those that do not require further doing.
  2. Go trough all new/recent messages again (as you normally do) and reply/react on those that need less that 2 minutes to work into (as stated by Get Things Done proposal). Now, in this second pass, you would delay/hide all those messages that you want to take into consideration further on.
  3. Work on those emails left that need more work to be done but are urgent enough not to be filtered.

If everything goes as I suppose, eventually you would end up with an "empty" Inbox, as you have worked on all stuff that needed to be dealt with and delayed all of those that do not need your urgency OR cannot be dealt with yet.
Never got an empty Inbox myself! The most I could do is let the Inbox with some 20-50 emails related to things that need to be done in the future.

During the day, some of those hidden messages will pop up as new emails appear in the inbox. In any case I can decide to give them some more time or act on them at that time.

This is more or less the same behaviour I do use nowadays. The big difference is that right now my brain filters again, and again, and again, and again all time the same 50 new messages to choose which is next. That is tiring, neuron consuming, and takes you out of focus, as every time you read for the 10th time a message you must focus again on why you chose yes or no.

Eventually, if you have time during your day and the Inbox is cleared out, you would unhide Hidden messages, order them by Hidden Timeout, and try to advance in your work if some of the messages can be dealt with with the extra time you have. That, again, is normal behaviour (at least in my case), except that you would have prearranged them by HideUntil, so you can surely act on them one by one without, again, having to go through those 50 messages again to chose what is next.

Now... that being a ToDo List.
I tried some times to use ToDo Lists but never worked for me. The fact is that an Inbox is De Facto a ToDo List. By definition, I would argue! :-D

One of the most important things I got from GTD rules is "have all your tasks in the same list, or very little lists"

Given that Inbox is the main ToDo List, make sense to give Inbox the tools to help you with the list, instead of having to move every single email to a ToDo Task.

Yet, TB ToDo Tasks do not have neither the ability to push back the tasks. You can delay them and that increases the Timeout limit (sorry I have TD in Catalan, not sure what is the correct field name in english).

And yet again, at least in my case, but I bet it is a common case, most info about a task related to an email is in the thread of the email. When I convert the email into a task, I lose this environment. When I use the Inbox like a ToDoList de facto, I tend to save in the inbox those messages that are still relevant for the task to be closed. So when I deal with the issue, I move all of them to its end folder. When I create a task from an email, it is not easy for me to jump back and forth from ToDo to email folders to Inbox. So I end up not using ToDo.

Not sure if it is a common practice. I imagine most of you work in bigger companies that mine, and you end up using other tools as your main ToDo List driver, but I imagine there is more people like me that, if they need something to be done, they send an email to themselves so they don't forget. Am I that strange? I guess I am not.

No indeed; I use Todoist, which is a great To-Do list, but I find most often I email myself a quick reminder, then tag it To-do in TB.

Attached image message tagged "hidden" —

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Attached image create custom view —
Attached image use the custom view —

Workaround: tag the message "hidden", add "View" toolbar widget to the unified toolbar, create a custom view "nohiddenmessages", switch between the views "nohiddenmessages" and "All"

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