[Kde-pim] Status icons vs. labeling

[Sven Burmeister]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sven
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