379912 - add user-configurable mail status flag/state (could use tags)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Justin Long]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3
Build Identifier: version 1.5.0.10 (20070221) (also build 2)

Tags are presently status indicators of a typical email. Although Build 2 allows you to add additional tags, these are also really status indicators. Outlook has the ability to flag an entry in a similar way. A good addition to this is the ability to "check mark" or otherwise mark an entry as being complete. (In Build 2 I added an additional tag called "done").

However, it would be really nice to also be able to "tag" messages with a dynamically-built keyword (e.g. along the lines of del.icio.us or flickr or what have you). This would be similar in a way to Gmail's labels. This would enable someone to rapidly assign categories to emails even if they get slotted into particular folders. There was an extension for 1.5 (although it did not work) that tried to accomplish this, but it would be better done as an inline feature of an email view.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

I'm sorry, I don't really understand what you're driving at here. It almost sounds like you want some tags to be mutually exclusive, e.g., if something is tagged in-process, tagging it as done would remove the in-process tag, and we would somehow know that was supposed to happen. Is that the flavor of what you're suggesting?

Comment 2

[Justin Long]

1. A "Label" (e.g. tag, whatever, like Gmail label or Flickr tag) and "Tags" (e.g. flags, as they are now) ought to be mutually exclusive, yes.
2. A "tag" of "in-process" and "done" *could* be mutually exclusive although I suppose they don't absolutely have to be. For example, right now in Gmail I have some labels set up: !0-Done, !1-Maybe, !2-ToDo. These are not mutually exclusive and sometimes I have !0 and !2 both. But in Outlook there are colored flags that are similar to the Thunderbird tags, and you can have multiple flags - UNTIL you assign something as done.

The main functionality that I'm suggesting here is the addition of labels/tags, with a nice UI (e.g. keyboard, auto-popup of previously used tags, etc) AND the addition of a "done" to the "tags", preferably that overrides all other tags (but this would not be essential from my perspective).

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

#1 - are you suggesting an option that *prevents* assigning multiple tags?

#2 sounds like some sort of task oriented states governed by "rules", where some states preempt (clear) others.

The UI you are suggesting is partly https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=363473 

Comment 4

[Justin Long]

What I am primarily suggesting is that an email could have two things associated with: a "status" code (and that could be multiple codes--e.g. done, to-do, whatever) and "tags" - which are descriptive labels, and could also have multiple tags. If it were possibly to easily and dynamically build a tag list (a la del.icio.us) for individual emails, it would make it easier to find certain emails.

Comment 5

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

I am re-titling the bug to make your last response more explicit...

"Tags" as you describe them currently exist as tags in Thunderbird.  As such, it sounds like the enhancement you are requesting is a first-class 'Status' field that you, the user, can define a number of valid states for.  A message can have at most one 'Status' value at a time.

This sounds vaguely like add-on territory, but I agree that explicit support for mail work-flow sounds like something a lot of people might want, with only the adventurous using tags to accomplish in a haphazard fashion.

This could all probably be accomplished under the hood using tags, and could allow for multiple sets of mutually exclusive tags that appear as a single state variable, but it would likely be folly to (try and) expose a generic configuration mechanism for it...

Comment 7

[Justin Long]

Yes, I would agree that  having both a multi-value tag field AND a single-value status field would resolve this request. The last time I checked, the Tags could not be dynamically created "on the fly" as you might with del.ici.ous for example. When I am tagging a message I would prefer not to have to go through a menu system to add another tag. On the other hand, I don't think a status code needs to be derived on the fly. At least it doesn't in my personal workflow.

Comment 8

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

I think bug 370076 (create tags using the keyboard) probably covers your del.ici.ous desires with sorta-"on the fly" creation proposed.  If it does, I suggest you add yourself to its cc list; if it doesn't, try and find another bug that does and if none exists, create a new bug specifically for that desire.

Note: Based on my understanding of the tags internals at this time, I'd probably advise against going crazy with the tag creation, at least if you're using IMAP accounts.

Comment 9

[Justin Long]

Yes, that bug does indeed do what I meant.

I will leave this bug open to deal with the Status marker concept.