GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 562397
Make more obvious how user can manually apply new filter rule to a folder
Last modified: 2021-05-19 11:38:03 UTC
Currently, if you want to run a filter that you have just created on a folder, then you have to select all the messages in the folder, and then go "Message -> Apply Filters". This seems a bit counterintuitive, since (for me at least) most of the time that a filter is created, I want to run it on an inbox, to clean it up and move particular types of messages to their own folder. As such, the typical use-case is applying filters to a whole folder, rather than to individual messages. The UI could be a bit clearer if there were a more obvious way to apply filters to a folder, such as one or more of the following: * Have a "Folder -> Apply Filters" menu item. * An alternative to this might be to right-click on a folder, and say "Apply Filters". * Another alternate approach might be to have something in the "Edit -> Message Filters" dialog box to say "run now", to apply all of the filters now. Basically, I looked at all of the above, trying to remember how to apply filtering (which I knew I had done a few weeks ago), and was beginning to think I was imagining things .... until I saw it was under the "message" menu, which was not where I was expecting to find it (since I was applying the operation to the _folder_, or applying the _filter_ to the folder, therefore I expected this to be in either the filter or the folder items/menus).
> As such, the typical use-case > is applying filters to a whole folder, rather than to individual messages. No. The typical usecase is to continously apply filters to incoming mail, instead of waiting for three years and then suddenly realizing "Oh, I want to clean up my Inbox". ;-)
I think that may be the ideal use-case, unfortunately not the typical one ;-) Perhaps the Chinese proverb of "the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now" applies, to helping the user get into filtering. I.e. When the user realizes they should have made a filter 3 years ago, then they're probably going to want to apply it to a folder, and we should help them do that and become more proficient users. I.e. In the situations where you want to manually run a filter, then the object is likely to be a folder, rather than an individual message.
A fourth alternative might be to add an "Apply Now" button to the rule editor, so you can test the filter without having to exit the editor. I'm thinking for Incoming filters, "Apply Now" would run the filter on all your Inbox folders (unless restricted by a "Source Account" condition). Similarly, for Outgoing filters, it would run the filter on all your Sent folders. I guess we'd have to make that clear in the UI somehow, perhaps by way of a tooltip? How frequently are filters applied to other folders? I don't have a good sense of whether that's a common use case. Common enough to warrant adding more bloat to the menus, that is. Seems like a search is what you'd want there.
*** Bug 501479 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 349440 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
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