479282 - Configurable frequency and granularity of "new mail" notifications

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[cmtalbert]

I love the new growl notifications on the mac in shredder.  However, I'd love the ability to turn some of them off.  We need the ability to tune this so that it doesn't become an annoyance.

Here are some ideas about ways we can tune this feature:
* By specifying an "importantness" tag for specific contacts - if a contact is marked as important then that contact's messages will get displayed in the notification.  
* By tagging a folder the same way so that any messages routed to that folder can either be "important" or not.  This way if I route my bugmail to a folder, I can tell Shredder not to notify me about those messages.
* By tagging a mail account as important or not.  For instance, I'd like my Mozilla mail account to notify me, but not my bulk email account.

Each of these have different trade offs in the amount of work that people would need to do to configure their mail account.  I think as a first pass at this it'd be great to have a set of preferences.  In the future it'd be awesome to have the system figure out what accounts and folders are most important based on your behavior and have the notifications learn to notify you according to the way you work.  For instance I spend a bunch of time in two primary email accounts, so it'd be great to have notifications for that but not for the rest of the email accounts that I track.

Marking blocking ? because I think that it would be necessary to have some kind of preference structure here before we ship Tbird 3.

Comment 1

[David Humphrey (:humph)]

I really think we need to consider doing this as an extension so that it doesn't block shipping tb3.

> * By specifying an "importantness" tag for specific contacts - if a contact is
> marked as important then that contact's messages will get displayed in the
> notification.

There is already a hook in the notification code per author, if you have an observer set to watch for "newmail-notification-requested", you'll get the full name + email of the author, and can say "no" to having it included in the growl notification.

> * By tagging a folder the same way so that any messages routed to that folder
> can either be "important" or not.  This way if I route my bugmail to a folder,
> I can tell Shredder not to notify me about those messages.

I can easily add another hook to say, 'this folder just got mail, notify for it?'

> * By tagging a mail account as important or not.  For instance, I'd like my
> Mozilla mail account to notify me, but not my bulk email account.

A mail account is a root folder, so this is just a special case of the above, really.  Also easy to do.

I have other bugs I need to work on, but if someone is willing to do an extension (or even do this in the app), I'll gladly add these extra hooks for observers to use.

Comment 2

[Kent James (:rkent)]

One of the filter actions in my extension FiltaQuilla suppresses notifications, and provides the granularity that I need. I don't use Macs, so I would appreciate some comments on whether it acts as you expect there.

Humph, all it does is reduce the total new message count on a folder. The heart of the code are these three lines:

        var hdrCount = aMsgHdrs.length;
        numNewMessages = numNewMessages - hdrCount;
        folder.setNumNewMessages(numNewMessages);

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Quite similar to bug 11040...

Comment 4

[cmtalbert]

And while I'm at it..We also need a way to say "only notify me if we I am on the "to" list of the email.  Getting notifications for emails where I am CC'd or even worse, from emails where I'm just part of a larger list are useless because for me those are lower priority than emails that people have directly sent to me.

Just yet another tweak.  Thanks!

Comment 5

[David Ascher (:davida)]

I agree that it'd be great to tweak this, but I suspect we wouldn't block on this.

Comment 6

[Pid]

Can I suggest that at the most simple level, the ability to turn Growl on and off in each account's preferences would solve most of the initial issues people have (and will have) in using it with Thunderbird?

Comment 11

[Ben]

I agree with comment 6.

I have 15 accounts in one profile and for most of them I don't want any alert.

K-9 has a configuration of the new mail alert per account. (And also some nice options, such as "Include outgoing mail" (if sent by myself) and "Contacts only".)