[Kde-pim] Status icons vs. labeling

Sun Dec 7 15:38:27 GMT 2008

On Sunday 07 December 2008, Sven Burmeister wrote:
> Hello everybody!
>
> 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.
>
> 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?

> 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.

And that's exactly what should happen. If it does not happen then this 
appears to be a regression. Maybe it was broken during the porting from 
KDE 3 to KDE 4.

> 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.

True, but marking a message as action-item or todo or whatever is 
different from creating an action-item/a todo in KOrganizer. But maybe 
there shouldn't be a difference. Yeah, I think that makes sense. If I 
mark a message as action-item/todo then I'd want it to show up in my 
list of action-items/todos.

> 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".

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.

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.

> 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).

> 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 don't think it's necessary to add such a setting. Instead "Mark as 
action-item" should probably be removed and be replaced by a default 
label. IIRC, the next version of KMail does support labels.

> Watched status. Apply it to the subsequent group, if the view is
> threaded.

Seems to be a bug that this does not happen.

> I hope I made some sense and would like to hear other's opinion on
> this matter.

Thanks a lot for your analysis!

Regards,
Ingo
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