558332 - Customize Archive folders strings

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Christophe Humbert]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3pre) Gecko/20100405 Firefox/3.6.3plugin1 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: 

Following idea from Sven on bug 522761 comment 33,

Introduce a formatting string so that the
archive structure can be easily customized by users. Having
a fixed structure is asking for trouble.

It could be an idea to have a pref like
'mail.server.default.archive_folder_structure_format' where
you can specify strftime-like formatting to suit your needs.
Define '/' to be the folder separator, and you can have things
like:

  "%Y/%m/"     -> 2010/04/<message>
  "%Y-%m/"     -> 2010-04/<message>
  "%Y/%B/"     -> 2010-April/<message>
  "%Y/%V/"     -> 2010/14/<message>    # ISO 8601 week number
  "Arch %Y/"   -> Arch 2010/<message>


Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Peter Lairo]

Will there be a "formatting string" to maintain the existing folder structure (without dates sub-folders)? e.g.:

Inbox A
 - Project 1
 - Project 2
Inbox B
 - Family
 - Friends
Local Folders
 - Project 3
 - Project 4

Archive
 -Inbox A
    - Project 1
    - Project 2
 -Inbox B
    - Family
    - Friends
 - Local Folders
    - Project 3
    - Project 4

It would be great to have UI to set these preferences. Without UI, it's NOT "easily customized by users".

Comment 2

[Sven Ulland]

Good point, Peter. What about something as easy as
reserving one formatting character (let's say "%Q"
just for the sake of having an example) to refer to
the existing folder structure? I.e.

  format: "%Y/%B/%Q/"
  result: 2010/April/Family/<message>

In your example, Peter, you list multiple inboxes
under a single archive. I might be missing some details,
but I would assume there would be one archive per
account, for example with archive format "%Y/%B/%Q":

Account: [e-mail]
- Inbox
- Foobar
- Archive
  - 2009
    - October
      - Inbox
      - Foobar
  - 2010
    - April
      - Inbox
      - Foobar

Account: [e-mail]
- Inbox
- Projects
- Archive
  - 2009
    - October
      - Inbox
      - Projects

The reasoning here is that the archive mechanism
actually does move messages around physically; it
doesn't merely create a virtual view. It might make
sense to add yet another pref that lets you specify
where the archive should be kept, but it could make
things more complicated than they need to be. Ideas?

As for having a UI configuration, it could be an
idea to simply present a few presets that can be
selectable in a combobox. Selecting either of them
would show an example of how the archive layout would
look. An additional note about the config editor can
be added so that interested users can customize the
archiving exactly to their liking.

Comment 3

[Peter Lairo]

I have limited space on some of my IMAP accounts / don't trust all of them for my backup data / prefer to have all my backups/archives together in one location. And after all, I'm archiving to get the e-mails out of the current location/account. That is why I think the option to put all archives into one archive folder under Local Folders would be important/useful/needed.

I also think the default should be to at most fragment the archiving by year (and not by month). Hard drive space is super cheap and huge, and most users don't receive or keep enough e-mails to make it worthwhile to dig through a large number of sub-folders (5 years would be 60 sub-folders! Per account!).

Comment 4

[Msquared]

(In reply to comment #0)


> Following idea from Sven on bug 522761 comment 33,
> 
> Introduce a formatting string so that the
> archive structure can be easily customized by users. Having
> a fixed structure is asking for trouble.

Looks like there's currently an extension that provides this functionality:

  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/message-archive-options/