378605 - Uncollapse hierarchy for Recent Folders

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Scott MacGregor]

I got this suggestion from someone via e-mail and it makes a lot of sense. In the Move / Copy menus, don't hide recent folders as a sub menu under 'Recent Folders', this makes them less convenient to access. In general, the <Recent> sub-menu does NOT help save users' effort in folder selection. It requires the same number of mouse actions as users' top-level folders (in my case, <[e-mail]>
and <Local Folders>). Furthermore, you don't even know if the folder you want is one of your recent folders without opening the recent folder menu..

Instead, remove the Recent Folder hierarchy so the menus look more like:

Move --> Recent Folder 1
         Recent Folder 2
         Recent Folder 3
         ---------------
         Account 1        --> Inbox
         Account 2
         Account 3

Copy-->  Recent Folder 1
         Recent Folder 2
         Recent Folder 3
         ---------------
         Account 1        --> Inbox
         Account 2
         Account 3

cc'ing Magnus in case he wants to take a stab at this.

Comment 1

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Scott, currently we have 13 sub-menu items under Recent. Do we want to move all of them one level higher or should we reduce it to a more meaningful number like 10?

Comment 2

[David :Bienvenu]

personally, if you flatten it out like that, I think you'd want to make it an even  smaller number, like 5. Which is tricky, because the recent folders view shares the same datasource, and you don't want to reduce that to 5, because you'd break the recent folders view. And the datasource doesn't "sort" the folders, so I'm not sure how easy this is going to be to do...

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

maybe ...

Move --> Recent Folder 1
         Recent Folder 2
         Recent Folder 3
         ...
         --> more
         ---------------
         Account 1        --> Inbox
         Account 2
         Account 3


how does "move to <blah> again" fit in to this adjustment?  see Bug 370324, whereas recent is overpopulated by filter actions rather than moves on the part of actual user action  - making move/copy recent not much use to me and anyone who gets a lot of new filtered mail.

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

I like that idea. But I think this is all non-trivial because we're using the rdf datasource to populate the menu automatically using an rdf datasource in the xul (at least, that's my recollection/understanding)

Comment 5

[Scott MacGregor]

ooh good point David, you would want it to have a much smaller value (like 5). That would make things much harder given that we use the same RDF property as the recent folder view which includes more than just 5 folders. The template builder will construct menu items for every folder with that property, I don't think we can tell it to stop after 5....That does make this much harder.

Comment 6

[Scott MacGregor]

Actually, looking at this more, I don't think the # of items is an issue, I think this could be a usability win even with the current # of recent folders we show in the menu.

Whether we show n recent folders in a sub menu 2 levels deep or n recent folders in a submenu 1 level deep, we are presenting the same amount of information to the user, just eliminating one level of depth.

Comment 7

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Scott, one issue I can see with the current implementation is, when you have multiple accounts. In such a case it is usual that you are mostly working with the Inbox of each account. If you do so and open the recent folder menu the inboxes for all accounts only labeled as "Inbox" and you are not able to differentiate between them. Is it possible to add the account name to predefined folders like inbox, sent, trash, etc? If yes we should consider for these changes. 

Comment 8

[David :Bienvenu]

I used to have code that made it so if you had duplicate Inboxes (or any folders), I would add the account name for that folder in the pretty name displayed in the menu and folder pane. Somehow that code either was removed or stopped working.

Comment 9

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Doesn't matter to me where it's fixed, but for keeping track, comment 7 is bug 351692.

Comment 10

[Mark]

With regard to comment #7, I would like to suggest that the problem is bigger
than just having the same folder for more than one account.  You could just as
likely folders with the same name for the same account.  I always do.

When I start a new project, I create a new folder to hold all email regarding
that project.  I sub-categorize each project folder with the same folder
names.  Sort of a poor-man's project tracking system.  But this makes
"Move To -> Recent" and "Copy To -> Recent" almost useless.  I cannot tell
which folder is which.

If the account and path for each folder were shown, it would really help.

See <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=351692#c4">
bug 351692 comment #4</a>