I’m terrible at following mailing lists, really, really poor at it 
I think this is related to the low signal to noise ratio when you’re subscribed to many lists. A thought occurred to me, and I wanted the tubes to give me their opinion.
Lets take for example there’s a load of mailing list messages coming in to my inbox, anything that catches my eye I read (I don’t have a problem with this so far), if it’s important I flag it for replying to later (this doesn’t always work as things drop below the inbox horizon), when a mailing list message is flagged I have a virtual folder with mailing list messages which are flagged in it (this can this be done now with evolution, with search folders although I just tried it and the search folder never appeared). Now, when I reply to a message the mailing list thread is flagged by the mail client in such a way as all followups which are in response to my original email are highlighted say in yellow (nice non threatening colour), and messages which are related are in a more washed out, but still noticeable lighter yellow.
This means that I can both keep track of which messages I feel the need to reply to, and also the messages which are in response to my messages. Some people rave about threaded views, but I still find that threaded views are difficult to navigate, also conversation views like googlemail don’t really work for me.
In order to make this work there’s one last feature I don’t think evolution has (correct me if I’m wrong) which would be “Highlight messages with this header, or that header as this colour” – bears some thinking about I feel.
Along side this, having some default search folders configured in evolution could probably help usability, e.g. in apple mail there’s a combined inbox for your accounts which is essentially a search folder. Also, I’d like to be able to have search folders at the top, and switch off the “On this computer” menu, neither of which seem to be possible
You can use Evolution’s filters to assign Labels (for which you can define the colors), to messages based on headers.
I think the way GMail works is extremely well designed: anything I don’t want to read, I mute. If I’ve read a thread, I archive it — if there are subsequent messages in that thread, it reappears in my inbox. Only threads i need to read or reply to are left in my inbox. Current inbox size: 1 thread.
Thanks rodney, this might help me find zen
David, I said GMail doesn’t work for me, and this isn’t anything against the interface, which is brilliant, the issue is with “taking action” I’m very very disorganised with things like this, if I have to do something immediately to keep the balance then it’s not really much help to me I need something which is automated and background, much like the way I think.
This is why I want to be able to have this kind of mailing list scenario set up where things I care about are immediately there, without thinking and without having to action ‘yet’. Much like the autofocus system for managing tasks, which works quite well for me, but would work better if I could sync tasks everywhere i use them
Er… You mean mailing list mail arrives in your inbox? Maybe it’s my usenet heritage — way back in 1993 I wrote an email client that looked and functioned like a usenet client — but all mailing lists are sorted into their own folder. The inbox is purely for personal mail (and spam).
I tried this, but as I’m not going to monitor all of the mailing lists all of the time, and evolution doesn’t allow you to distinguish between “New” and “Unread” messages it means I tend to glance over the mailing lists less often, missing things, even things I replied to, folderising everything has ended up fail for me too, so I’m considering working out some search folders to replace actual server folders… Then again, I still can’t re-order the evolution tree to put the search folders at the top.
The “new” vs “unread” mail is an interesting point though, new mail being things that have arrived recently, e.g. within an hour or since you last started your mail client…
@Rodney, you can only change the foreground colour which kinda defeats the point, I want the whole line to change colour not just the text, changing the text colour on the same background is really limiting for instance all lighter colours are immediately exempt, and many dark colours will look the same, especially on laptop screens which tend to distort colours slightly from various angles, changing both would be ideal, but just the background would be a good start. Although I’m not too familiar with the evolution source code this could be as simple as setting the “cell-background” property, although I’m not sure if evolution even using gtktreeview as the list view, it seems unlikely perhaps?
Karl, it’s using ETreeView for the mail list. It might have a similar property though.
I also have some other ideas about a new interface for managing e-mail and things like it, but still need to collect thoughts there, and put together some mock-ups and such.
Give me a shout when you want to do this, I’d like to get involved in some evolution usability stuff, for instance, flagging messages is fail, I have to right click, pop open a dialog and fill out a form, I’d like to have a popup box (styled and composited would be nice), so when I click on the flag column I can quickly set the flag properties at the very least a flag for follow up that just flags when clicked would be nice, same kind of thing could be done with message colours.
I might look at writing up some simple patches *if I get time*(TM) to have coloured rows and manipulating the sidebar order… just to scratch my own itches.