[Kde-pim] Status icons vs. labeling

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Sunday 07 December 2008, Sven Burmeister wrote:
> 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.

That's with the brand new message list, right?


> > > 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.

The terms used in the GUI do not need to be mathematically correct. As 
long as the user clearly understands what they do it's okay IMO.


> > 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)

new, unread, replied, etc., are not labels. "important", "todo", "spam", 
etc., can be considered a label. Maybe we should simply relabel the 
button to "Filter". *shrug*


> > > 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.

I didn't knew about this "clickable labels" stuff. Not sure, what to do 
about it.


BTW, watching threads works in KMail 1.9.10 (KDE 3.5.10) as expected. So 
it did get broken in KMail 1.10.


Regards,
Ingo
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