472380 - Provide icons in the column size in stead of the size in KB

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Pander]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008121622 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.5
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.18 (20081125)

Add an extra tab in Preferences / Display called icons. Provide a boolean checkbox called "Icons for sizes" with default value false. In this case all is the same in the overview of emails

When set to true, in the column "size", not the size in KB is shows either nothing if the size is less than 16KB or a certain icon (to be designed) with a red kind of color representing a *big* file.

The icon could be a red version of the green dot that is the icon when a message is marked in the "read" column.

Optionally this threshold of 16KB should be adjustable in this icon tab, but I think 16KB (or perhaps 32KB) is a good reference. Please do some research on this and see when files are getting attachments and what the average size is. According to my mailbox, the 16KB is a good rough indicator.

My mailbox has this:
smallest email with attachment: 30KB with .pdf, .doc, .xls, this about 99%
biggest email with attachment:  6000KB with multiple .jpg
smallest email without attachment: 1KB
biggest email without attachment: around 100KB, 90% is under 30KB

I would suggest setting it to 16KB and when configurable, have the user choose between 16KB, 32KB, 64KB and 128KB in single select radio buttons.

Implementing this will help people quickly find emails that should be deleted, properly archived or which attachments should be detached in order to use less disk space. People tend to use more and more their inbox as personal home directly. That is all fine with me ;) However when people get messages that they have used up their disk quota, this feature will help them clean up things.

Personally I also don't care if a message is 5KB or 6KB but I do care if it is 5MB.

Implementing this offers a 'hard' / 'boolean' (no fuzzy!) indication of candidate emails that after deletion, archiving or detaching the attchments will save disk space. Setting the limit in these lower regions of 16KB - 128KB will educate people about where their disk space is going, especially when they have a quota.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1

[Pander]

Also, it frees up a bit of space in the overview of emails because this column can be resized (fixed) to the width of the icon. This is an advantage for users with small laptop screen sizes (12" 13") or even smaller sizes on mobile devices.

Comment 2

[Pander]

And for the icon of the non resizeable column can, like the glasses for the read column and the paper-clip for the attachment column, a small cylinder be used. This would represent the disk space used.

Comment 3

[Pander]

Perhaps it is easer to use and implement to simply make an entire new column for this called 'Space Usage' or something. Then is it clear that Size shows the exact size and Space Usage what the impact is of storing this email.

Comment 4

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

ask to drivers... I think is wontfix.

Comment 5

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Can't see this happening for the core product. Should be very doable for an extension though.