[Kde-pim] Status icons vs. labeling

[Sven Burmeister]

Am Sonntag, 7. Dezember 2008 16:38:27 schrieb Ingo Klöcker:
> > 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.
>
> Not sure what you want to say, but I'd say let's get rid of the "Mark
> message as Spam/Ham" options. Hmm, my KMail (1.9.10, openSUSE 11.0)
> does not have those options anymore. Is this an openSUSE change?

If you enable Theme: Fancy with clickable status, you see the spm/ham icon 
that can be used to mark/label a message.

> > 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".
>
> Where do you see "set"? The English "translation" uses "mark" everywhere
> as far as I can tell. Or do you "complain" about KMail using the
> word "mark" in combination with the word "status"? Please don't get me
> wrong, but I'm not aware of a native speaker having complained about
> this. Maybe you are seeing an inconsistency where none exists.

Set is not used, but AFAIK a status is set and not marked. Yet one could say 
"mark message as: important status set", so I should probably not get hung up 
about it.

> BTW, KMail talks about "status" for traditional reasons and because
> new/unread/read/forwarded/replied clearly are statuses. Most of the
> things you think of as labels, i.e. important, todo, etc., have been
> added to KMail in later versions, but still before the term "label" has
> become popular. "Label" is a pretty new word/concept that has become
> popular with the advent of Google Mail. I don't really care whether we
> use "status" or "label" or whatever in KMail.

thinking about it there really isn't that much of a difference between a 
status and a label, is there? A message can have more than one status and more 
than one label. If so, only one of those two terms should be used all over 
kmail. So e.g. the theme would be called "Fancy with clickable labels" and the 
button next to the quicksearch "filter by label". currently it filters labels 
by status. (A label can have the status "enabled" though)

> > 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.
>
> I don't think application on all messages in the current folder is a
> good idea because it is unexpected since all other buttons only apply
> to the currently selected message(s). "Classify as spam/ham" already
> does most of what you propose, but clearly some improvements are
> possible. "Mark as spam/ham" should simply be removed (as is already
> the case in my KMail).

It's been a long time, but I think thunderbird had/has a spam column the user 
could use to mark emails as spam, i.e. click on the icon in that column (which 
would run statistics on that message) and then use some functionality to 
remove all those.

Sven
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