[Kde-pim] Re: New Email notifications

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hey,

Replying a bit late, thanks to private life. :)

On Thursday, September 30, 2010 16:59:26 Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> On Wednesday 29 September 2010 21:49:49 Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> > > > I'm not sure if KMail should send notifications about new emails
> > > > _at_all_ (I think it shouldn't). In Akonadi-times, we cannot just
> > > > assume that there's only one email client running at a time, this
> > > > has ramifications for UI and work- flow. There has to be one
> > > > central instance to do notifications. (In case of power management
> > > > and network management, we use a kded module as notification
> > > > policy agent.)
> 
> Okay, I do understand Sebastian in the way that he technically
> wants the notification be send from the central backend and not from the 
> frontend. 
> 
> But we all seem to agree that notification should be send
> for all folders, don't we?

No, that creates the exact mess we have now. Basically anybody using more than 
one folder for emails will disagree here. I think that's quite an important 
group of users.

> I believe that for each folder that gets presented to the user
> a notification should be possible. For remote and local folders.

Possible, Yes. Default: No, and if that should be configurable from Plasma. 
Lion Mail's emailnotifier picks folders called inbox (or i18n("inbox")) by 
default and shows new emails in there. Which folders to include in the list of 
new emails is configurable.

We now have an email component in the system tray, this one is responsible for 
showing that there's new email, and it does just that. So the user can see at 
any time wether or not there's new email. I've deliberately not used KNotify 
for this, but it could be added. At this point, it's not necessary IMO, for 
the following reason:

- filtering, you don't want to get a notification for an email that's still 
  being filtered somewhere else

- email is much more about status than it's about events ("there are currently 
  42 unread emails needing attention" vs. "someone sent an email")

- KNotify is a bit limited in showing what's really important, that's the 
  exact reason for creating Lion Mail's email notifier

Now if KMail did notifications by itself, it would bring another instance that 
does notifications (using KNotify), which would have to be synched with Lion 
Mail's behaviour.

In my opinion, KMail should provide a legacy mechanism to notify of new emails 
when it's run outside of Plasma, but run inside of Plasma, the user should 
kindly be pointed to the email notifier widget in the system tray.

Missing features should also be implemented in Lion Mail.

> > I fully agree, but until this central instance exists KMail should still
> > do it. Just as KMail will still do the filtering until there's an
> > Akonadi agent doing it.
> 
> To me KMail is now the "Mail" component of "Kontact".
> Technically there is the akonadi (backend), but it has part of the old
> KMail  functionality. The new frontend is not usable without the backend.
> I admit I have not yet tried alternative mail frontends. ;)

I want so see wether I have new emails even when KMail is not running. Those 
two are orthogonal.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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