On Dec 14, 2011 I wrote A tale of UI chains, on the subject of Rants, UI, and Thunderbird.

or, big UI oaks do from little tech decisions grow

or, how Thunderbird screwed me a bit, although it might be my own fault

I have five levels of caring about email.* They are:

Don't care
I've dealt with this
I probably ought to deal with this, or it prompts a thought, or something
I need to deal with this
I really, really need to deal with this

These levels get mapped to my inbox in the following ways:

Deleted
Archived (in an Archive folder)
In the inbox, read
In the inbox, unread
In the inbox, flagged Important (and probably marked unread too)

In four years of dealing with my work inbox through Evolution, this scheme has stood me in good stead. However, at the weekend I moved to Thunderbird 9, and two days later it screwed me. Or I screwed myself while it stood by and laughed. Or something. And it's all because my work IMAP account doesn't seem to have a Trash folder. Follow the bouncing ball...

When you set up a new IMAP account in Thunderbird, it asks where you want deleted messages to go. The default setting is "Move it to this folder: Deleted", which is what I have set for my gmail account.

However, for my work account, this complained that there was no such folder. Now, there's a Deleted folder, with little green rubbish bin icon*, in the left-hand sidebar under my work account as well. Clicking on that also says that "The current operation on 'Deleted' did not succeed. The mail server for account (myworkemail) responded: Mailbox doesn't exist: Trash."

OK, thought I... maybe that's not meant to work. Perhaps Canonical IS don't want me storing all my deleted emails on the server or something. However, I can't find a way of specifying a local folder as the Deleted folder for my IMAP account.

Now, I delete mail by accident all the time. So I was rather too scared to set "Remove [the mail] immediately" as my what-happens-when-I-press-delete-by-accident thing. Hence, the other option is to "just mark [the email] as deleted". What this does is it ~~strikes through~~ the line describing the email in my inbox, so I can later on "undelete" it if I want. That seemed OK for a couple of days. However (this is the second level of however), what that actually means is that you end up with the list of emails you can see in the window all being struck through, which is annoying. So I need a way of saying "fine, all those deleted emails are actually deleted and not just me hitting delete by accident", and that's "Compact" on the folder context menu.

However (third however level), immediately below "Compact" is "Mark Folder Read". So you can see that an inept person might accidentally click on the wrong menu item, and that's exactly what I did. And now I can't tell the difference between the 200 emails that I need to deal with and the other 200 that I might want to think about at some point, which is extremely irritating. All because I don't understand why my work email doesn't have a Trash folder.

I can't really blame the Thunderbird team for this. (Not that that stopped me when I did it, but I calmed down.) "Mark Folder Read" and "Compact" are both destructive, non-reversible actions. They're both hidden on a folder context menu, a place for experts. If I bitch that I ought to be able to undo making a folder read, then I should also bitch that I ought to be able to undo compacting, and that defeats the point: compacting is itself the undo mechanism for deleting! So I'm screwed and it's no-one else's fault, which normally means (reluctantly) that it's my fault.

Some of you will now be thinking: that's what you get for indicating a permanent state ("I need to deal with this") with an ephemeral marker (read status). And you're right, I suppose. However, email has an Important flag and that's it. There isn't an Important and a Very Important flag. Oh, there might be extensions to add that, but I'd want the status to show up, and be changeable, from the folder list (not just from an individual email). So clearly I need to change my habits. Perhaps there's an extension which colours the lines in the folder list differently depending on a flag I add? If I can change that colour from the folder list then that might be a good approach. How do you deal with differing levels of importance in email? Your thoughts are invited.

Roger

Would tags work? Right click on the email then go to "tag". You can have multiple tags, each with their own colour. If you have multiple tags on an email, it colours it with the highest priority colour.

sil

Roger: ooh, nice, I didn't know about that. That looks like the answer.

Phil

Can't you just create the top level folder on the server?

I find it hard to beleive that Canonical IS would prevent the creation of a deleted items folder for precisely the reason you state above.

Just right click on the top level of the account tree and select new folder. You can even make it a subfolder of your inbox if you need to.

As Roger says though, tags are the way to go.

Out of interest, why did you move from Evolution?

sil

Phil: I can't work out *how* to create the top level folder on the server. Thunderbird already presents a "Deleted" folder, even though it doesn't exist. I'm afraid to create a folder called "Trash", because then either (a) that will become my Trash folder and the "Deleted" folder won't work, or (b) I'll have *two* folders for my deleted items, one called Trash and one called Deleted and I'll never be able to delete the Trash one because it'll stop the other one from working.

I moved from Evolution because TB is now the default in Ubuntu and I like using the default apps where possible, because it helps me help other people when they have problems.

Danilo

I so miss Gnus "show unread and marked 'important' messages by default" and "show only folders with such messages by default" views! Since I switched to Evolution for my email, I've never been as efficient. I want to write plugins for it to do what Gnus did ages ago (Gnus had other problems, like needing 15 minutes to start up with Maildirs containing 200k+ messages), but never find the time.

As for the trash folder, you should be able to create one yourself. Also, the easy "undo" mechanism after you realize that you have messed up is to quickly kill your mail client before it emits IMAP commands to the server. You certainly should have wished for dial-up connection at that point :)

Aquarion

When I was using Thunderbird, I used the "Labels" (I think they've renamed these tags) functonality extensively, where I could create a label (called "Important" or "Salescrud" or "Action!"), and I could Group By that tag, so they appeared as a collapsable list of the right colour. This worked well.

Now, I use GMail's web interface almost entirely.

sil

OK, I have now created the Trash folder. By using Python's imaplib from the command line. Sigh. I hate solving problems like that, because the solution only works if you're like me, rather than like my dad.

Sarabian

The real issue is using emails to track things you need to do - but I guess you are happy working like that so I suggest tags/folders similar to what I use

@ACTION - stuff you need to do

@READ - stuff you need to read at some point

@REPLY - stuff that just needs a reply no other action required.

This keeps my inbox empty

Matt Mossholder

While the sequence of events is convoluted, the issue you had at the end ("Mark Folder as Read" rather than "Compact") is clearly a UI problem.

I have a similar problem with some of Google's web apps, where destructive actions are adjacent to non-destructive items. It is also a problem present in the Ubuntu desktop, where the "Close Window" control is right next to the dash.

Very annoying.

liberforce

You're not alone, I'm also using the "read" status to mark stuff I should do. In fact, I use the "starred" items, and sometimes the tags, but the problem is that unread status is the only one that appear next to each forder's name...

Matthew Barnes

There's probably 100 different ways to manage a large influx of email. I've found it's more about self-discipline and finding a process that works for you than the technical features of your favorite email client or webmail service.

Merlin Mann's "Inbox Zero" Google teck talk video is worth watching if you haven't already, or even if you have. I still watch it from time to time when I need some inspiration to help get me back on track.

Jon Nordby

I use tags for the use-case you describe here. The best thing is that they are mapped to the 1->6 keys, and that quick filter->tags will toggle filtering on tagged email in the current view.