[Kde-pim] Status icons vs. labeling

[Thomas McGuire]

Hi,

On Sunday 07 December 2008 13:50:51 Sven Burmeister wrote:
> I'd like to discuss the disconnection of the status icons and the rest of
> kmail/kontact.
>
> The spam status icon looks exactly like the spam-button in the toolbar, so
> if you sit a new user, even an old one, in front of kmail, why should he
> not assume that they both do the same?
>
> Further, why should one mark single mails as spam, i.e. use the spam
> status- icon? If the user does not use a spam tool, he would delete them
> right away. If he uses a spam-tool, e.g. bogofilter, he would want those
> mails to be piped through it in order to improve statistics. Even if he did
> not want to pipe them through a spam-tool but marks them as spam, one might
> be able to assume that he would like some functionality that acts on the
> status, i.e. moves all of them to the trash.

I think one reason for the user to mark a mail as not spam with the status 
icon is when the spam filter incorrectly marked a mail as spam. OTOH hand, the 
user can use the toolbar icons for that. So I agree that we should remove 
marking things as spam/ham status from the GUI. Please file a bug report 
against the "new message list" component so we remember.

> Maybe one could even assume that if users see the spam-status icon, they
> are entitled to think that kmail already has some build-in
> spam-functionality and thus will wonder why it does not take any action on
> spam.
>
> Watched status. One can set a single email to have a watched status. This
> does not mark any of the subsequent mails as watched, which is why I fail
> to see the purpose of "watched". If watched status just means "remember",
> there is already "important" and there is "action item". If it relates to:
> "I'm interested in the replies to that email" the current functionality
> fails if one filters for "watched" emails. And again, the very same icon is
> used in the context-menu to mark the group as watched, which makes sense if
> one thinks about the user being interested in the replies, so I claim that
> users would expect that all subsequent emails of a "watched" email are
> marked as such too.

Watched/ignored is broken right now, see 
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=175490.

> Action item status. There is a difference between action-item and todo,
> which is why the status was renamed from todo to action-item. Yet that
> difference is personal taste and might seem artificial to some, i.e. users
> might want to use the action-item status to ease the creation of todos.

Well, some people disagree, especially because todos in Kontact have quite a 
different meaning. I think it should be kept as "Action Item".

> The important status is perfect IMO. It mediates what it does. It relates
> only to that one email and cannot be mistaken with any other functionality
> within kmail/kontact.
>
> So although there might be a few more nuances to each of the above items, I
> think that the points I made show that the status icons and their
> functionality are not as obvious and straight-forward as they should be.
>
> This might also result from the usage of the word status vs. label or to be
> precise "set" (status) vs. "mark" (email as x). IMO what kmail currently
> does is not set the status of an email, but label/mark it as x. If one has
> a look at the context-menu, this seems to be confirmed. At least in the
> German translation, the same icon is used for status although the
> context-menu entry that does exactly the same uses "label/mark email as x".
>
> One approach would be to simply use different icons and name them
> differently. Another to integrate them into kontact.
>
> The spam status. One could replace the current spam/ham-buttons by a
> "process spam/ham status", which would process, i.e. pipe through the
> spam-tool, all mails of a folder that are marked as spam/ham and move those
> marked as spam to the trash. This would also remove the usage of the same
> icon for "classify as spam/ham", i.e. filtering, and "mark as spam/ham",
> i.e. label.
>
> The action-item status. Introduce a kmail setting that creates/removes a
> todo when the status is toggled. So users who do not differentiate between
> action- item and todo, do not have to right-click etc. and those that
> simply want to use it as label, can still do so.

I really think a config option for this would be overkill, and I like to use 
todo-marking without KOrganizer todos.

> Watched status. Apply it to the subsequent group, if the view is threaded.
>
> I hope I made some sense and would like to hear other's opinion on this
> matter.

Regards,
Thomas

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