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please make newmail-info more informative
Status:
RESOLVED: WONTFIX
Severity:
enhancement
Product:
Xfce4-mailwatch-plugin
Component:
General

Comments

Description Florian Schlichting 2006-06-03 16:11:37 CEST
I've been using mailchecker, and I've been looking forward to mailwatch because of its "informative" new-mail notification. I get a lot of email, and most of it is not really urgent - but some is, and I'm distracted a lot by looking into my mailbox whenever something new arrives. mailwatch alerts me in much the same way that mailchecker did, but the only additional information that I get in the tooltip is the _number_ of new mails.

How I'd like it to work is that whenever new mail arrives, mailwatch would popup a notification for a few seconds, displaying the FROM: and Subject: headers for each mail (people might want to configure popup vs. tooltip, and the amount of seconds until the popup goes away again...)

on a side note, mailwatch doesn't seem to cooperate with mutt on local mboxes as effectively as mailchecker did - mailwatch will only notice that new mail has been seen/read/deleted once I commit the mailbox changes, whereas mailchecker would grey out its icon as soon as mutt has reopened/read the mbox containing new mail (which I'd prefer since it's more accurate, and I'm notified if something new arrives while I'm still working through the stuff that arrived overnight)

anyway, thanks for good work, and I hope you find these suggestions worthwhile!
Comment 1 Brian J. Tarricone (not reading bugmail) 2006-06-03 17:27:28 CEST
Showing mail as it arrives is definitely out of the scope of what this plugin does, and isn't going to work properly for remote mailboxes anyway.
Comment 2 Florian Schlichting 2006-06-03 17:55:20 CEST
hang on, as can be seen from the summary, this bug is about

1) making the tooltip more informative

it contains an additional wish to

2) optionally having a popup notice instead of or in addition to the tooltip

and it adds a few observations and my personal preferences regarding

3) differences between the mailwatch and mailchecker plugin's idea of what constitutes "new mail"


it's not at all about "showing mail as it arrives" (if that's really what mailchecker did - and then that's the least important part of this bug report), as opposed to when mail *has* arrived; instead it is a request for a feature that I believe will be useful for all users of this plugin, and particularly for those accessing remote mail over a slow connection or through a web interface
Comment 3 Pasi Orovuo 2006-06-03 18:11:02 CEST
(In reply to comment #2)
> 
> 3) differences between the mailwatch and mailchecker plugin's idea of what
> constitutes "new mail"
> 

The current behaviour (=different from Mailcheck) was chosen because Thunderbird does funky things with mboxes, and they'd always seem to have new mail. Plus the old method would not reveal number of new mails at all. The current behaviour is much more reliable than Mailcheck's, as long as *you* tell the mailbox which mails you've read by saving the mailbox ($ by default in mutt).

And no, (we are|I'm) not going to add an option to choose between the two behaviours.
Comment 4 Florian Schlichting 2006-06-03 18:23:43 CEST
I see.

so ok, forget about that part. Do you think it's possible to include information on sender and subject of new mails?

and I would have thought that it's not too difficult to remember states between polls, and when the state has changed, alert about the differences? (by state I mean the information displayed: number of new mails, sender and subject)
Comment 5 Pasi Orovuo 2006-06-03 18:44:26 CEST
(In reply to comment #4)
> I see.
> 
> so ok, forget about that part. Do you think it's possible to include
> information on sender and subject of new mails?
> 

While possible for mbox, it's not quite that simple. I'm not ready to add support for something we can't provide for every supported mailbox type, and I'd guess this is information we can't get for IMAP/POP3 mailboxes unless downloaded and checked locally (which is out of scope of Mailwatch).

And there's also the issue of notification mechanism/protocol, as subject etc. is not something we can display in the tooltip. Should we support certain D-Bus notification system - of which there is no consensus inside Xfce? Or use custom (D-Bus?) notification that'd require specific support from Notification software? Should we include our own notification system - of which I'd vote against as it's just not what Mailwatch does.

While this is a good suggestion, to me it seems there's currently just too many open issues regarding the implementation.

> and I would have thought that it's not too difficult to remember states between
> polls, and when the state has changed, alert about the differences? (by state I
> mean the information displayed: number of new mails, sender and subject)
> 

Yup, it actually currently does this. The thing is: mutt does not change state (=save the mailbox on disk so the changes are visible to other programs) until it exits or user manually saves the state.
Comment 6 Brian J. Tarricone (not reading bugmail) 2006-06-04 03:11:22 CEST
In the future, if you have more than one request, open a separate bug for each.

Regarding showing extra information about the mail (sender, subject, etc.), how do you present this in a tooltip or popup?  If there's a single new mail, that's not too bad, but what if there's more than one?  What if, in the last check interval, 20 new mails arrived?  We don't poll the mailboxes constantly, and for remote protocols (IMAP, POP3, GMail), there's no way to receive an async notification.

If I close a bug WONTFIX, I mean it, really.
Comment 7 Florian Schlichting 2006-06-13 07:05:06 CEST
I realize you really don't want any of these enhancements in mailwatch. Your software. Thanks for taking the time to explain this to me.

Just in case any other user wanting such functionality ends up looking at this bug report: you may be interested to take a look at gnubiff (http://gnubiff.sourceforge.net/), which as of version 2.2 can sit in the system tray - or you can use xfce's XfApplet-Plugin to put it on a panel...

Bug #1890

Reported by:
Florian Schlichting
Reported on: 2006-06-03
Last modified on: 2010-11-09

People

Assignee:
Brian J. Tarricone (not reading bugmail)
CC List:
1 user

Version

Version:
1.1.0 or older

Attachments

Additional information