GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 200090
Flag for followup ("reply later")
Last modified: 2013-09-10 14:02:48 UTC
A user should be able to flag a message for followup, meaning that the user is later reminded to respond to the message. This should happen via right-click on the message list.
mailer will have to talk to calendar somehow, but events should not show up in calendar, and the alert needs a button to take them to the message to reply to.
*** bug 202319 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** bug 206510 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** bug 209001 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is fairly frequent; marking 1.2.
upping as a triage/tracking thing. Will settle on a real priority later.
There are a lot of requests for this, ettore, so I'm thinking it should be more than normal. Up to you, though.
The "flagging" part of this is in CVS. We still need to add something so that Evo will nag the user if the flagged messages aren't replied to soon enough.
Sweet. How does Outlook do this? Do we need a dialog / UI design?
BTW, I'm currently using a smaller version of the "reply" icon for flagging messages that need a reply. We'll probably want to have one of our crack artists whip up something better...
Adding myself and kevin to CC so we know when to document this feature.
This might actually be a job for the calendar guys, depending on how the "nag" function is implemented. I never got a chance to see how Outlook does it. My Windows box (which in general I keep in the corner in the back of a closet, not plugged into anything :-) ) seems to have developed power supply problems... Since I don't know what is involved, I haven't changed the time estimate.
Created attachment 41004 [details] message-tags.glade
anna: message-tags.glade is a mockup of a possible dialog box for setting message tags for things like "Flag for follow-up" This is mostly an exact rip-off of Outlook's dialog... anyways, feel free to change it/etc - give it some UI love ;-)
adding jpr to the cc list on this one since he is the calendar maintainer.
Just a few comments on the gui you made, Jeff. Please look at this screenshot: http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/follow-up.png (which will also be the first attachment to this bug.) As you can see, I have changed a few things from your version, specifically: 1) I added accelerators and changed the border width/padding values a bit. (The Standard Evolution Way is to set border width/padding/cellspacing to 3. Period. :) 2) I replaced the date selection widget you were using with the one from the appointment editor (well, actually I just took a screenshot of that one and pasted it in, but you get the point. The "calendar" label is just unnecessarily ugly. :) 3) I replaced all instances of "tag" with "flag" (on the presumption that, since both "tag" and "flag" are a bit jargony for the innocent grandmother user, we might as well go with the one that a) iconifies well and b) Outlook uses. You know, for ease of migration and all.) 4)I added a "Completed" checkbutton to allow the user to mark the follow up as complete after he's done it.(Note that in Outlook the little red flag icon representing that a message has a follow-up action disappears after the message has been followed up on. ) 5)I capitalized all of the options in the "Call" combo box as they would be capitalized in a book. 6)I replaced the help text at the top of the dialog with "Message: <subject from selected message>". I searched through my mail folders for the subject with the most characters (found one with 100), and used this subject in my mockup. Setting the text to be wrapped seem to produce reasonably attractive output. So, why did I add this information? Well, basically to reinforce for the user which message he's adding the follow-up flag to. In Outlook, this dialog is modal-- that's ridiculous. Modality should be used sparingly -- only in cases where the application needs the information from the dialog in order to continue...which is really not the case with this dialog. In this case, making the dialog modal would restrict the freedom of the user unnecessarily. There's no reason (that I know of) why the user shouldn't be able to open multiple copies of this dialog for multiple messages at once, or to open this dialog, and then decide to switch to the calendar to check the due date of something before settings the "due by" value. What do you think about this? it seems useful to me, and the super-long subject I'm testing it on looks fine. Hmm. I think that concludes my comments... Let me know what you think and if you need anything from me.
Created attachment 41008 [details] Screenshot of my mockup
Created attachment 41009 [details] Glade file mockup of the "Flag to Follow Up" dialog
Created attachment 41010 [details] supporting pixmap (taken from the appointment editor) for the "Flag to Follow Up" glade file-- (needs to be saved in the appropriate pixmaps directory for the glade file to display properly)
anna: looks good ;-) thanks.
Completed so far: - Message-List columns: Flag Status (flagged: yes/no), Follow Up Flag (flag type: Reply, Review, Forward, etc), and Due By (when must I followup on the flag?) - Follow-Up Flag editor (obtainable via right-click menu "Flag for Follow Up" item) - Flag For Followup menu items (right click and non-right-click) - Flag Completed menu items - Clear Flag menu items - Filter/VFolder/Search: [Follow Up] [is Flagged / is not Flagged] - View:Current View:By Follow Up Flag menu item which does what Outlook does... TODO (maybe?): - Allow more filter/vfolder/search criteria?
I talked about this with Anna a bit today, and I had a few comments we agreed I would attach here. Basically: I would be happy if it was quick and easy to flag messages. I guess everyone agrees with this. The dialog is good to have for special cases, but at least I often just want to flag a message as something, not to worry about thinking when the due date should be etc. Thus I made a mockup, which has a submenu on the right-click-menu: Flag message -> Something. Then, on the bottom there would be a separator and a "Advanced..." -menu entry which gives Anna's dialog. If you just mark the flag from the "quick menu" it would mark the due date as NONE (which Outlook AFAIK defaults to as well) - or it could just nag after a week or so. I dont think I want to get distracted by setting a lot of dialog stuff for every few mails. The dialog is very good to have around for special cases though. Tig
Created attachment 41040 [details] Mockup of the flag message -submenu (those yellow flags would of course be the cool flag icons we will create)
I finished up some work on the mockup for this so that it now handles multple messages. Please take a look at: http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/flag-me.png Basically, this design uses an etable to list the messages which the user has selected; my feeling is that they can then add or remove columns from the view as they fit. I will attach the glade file to this bug along with the icons that Jakub has made for it. (A small blue flag for the message list, and a large blue flag for the dialog). What do you think, Jeff?
Created attachment 41042 [details] new glade mockup that handles multple messages
sounds good, I'm about to commit your changes to CVS...
Created attachment 41043 [details] small flag icon for e-table column header in message list
Hey guys, After playing for Jeff's (admittedly well-done) implementation, I've noticed a few more problems. First, it should be possible to set a due date of "None"; and, this should probably be the default due date. I propose adding "None" to the date combo box, and making the time combo box insensitive when "None" is selected. Using the current design, I tried setting a flag's due date to none by erasing the contents of the date entry; I was allowed to set the flag like this, but I don't know what due date was actually set. Which brings me to problem number 2.... Problem 2: there is no way to tell when a message's flag is due after setting it.(Except that when the flag is overdue, the message is marked in red.) Similarly, there is no way to change a message's flag's due date after setting it. I can think of three solutions for this problem: a) Add an "Edit Flag..." menu item which allows the user to open the flag editor, where she can see and edit the due date. b) Add due date information to the Follow Up column. This probably makes the due date column horribly wide, however. c) Modify the header html to include the follow-up action and due date. Something simple like this: http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/editted-header.png would suffice, though it could be more attractive. I would lean toward combining a & b. What do you think?
b) is already doable, there's actually a column for it: "Due Date" a) is also doable, you can just select "Flag for Followup" again and re-set the date. I immitated Outlook in that the right-click menu disappears after it is set once but the Actions menu is still usable. I can change this if you want though... c) this might be neat to do. I wouldn't make it look like just another header though, as that wouldn't call attention to itself like it should. Microsoft Outlook, iirc, puts it at the top of the header and puts a 'info' icon next to it. We could probably also do something similar? Should be "easy" to do if you want it.
I'd actually like the info icon like in Outlook. Anna?
yup, that would be great. if we can do it, we should.
Okay, I'm going to work on prettifying the HTML that Jeff added to cvs. I made myself a task for this, and have made this bug depend on the task. (See #23278 for reference)
Okay, the HTML is available here: http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/headers.html Sorry, I tried to add it to the mail-display.c file and had all kinds of icon troubles. :(
eh... where'd the html go? :-)
Okay, i am a total maniac. I don't even want to talk about exactly where the html went-- here's the redone version: http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/headers/headers.html And here is a free linux tip, kiddies. When you are copying say, a lot of files from one machine to another, you might be tempted do something like "scp *.html anna@wyspa:/home/anna/wherever" . ha! this is a good way to overwrite existing files on the machine you are copying them to, if you aren't being careful with your filenames. ha!
alllrighty then. I've added the HTML now, but for some reason the image doesn't load unless I do "View->Load Images" which isn't what we want... Once I figure that out, this'll be complete.
this is now complete. yay!
Need connector support for this.
OK, actually, Exchange lets you set arbitrary flags. The provided ones are just defaults. So the option menu needs to become a combobox (with the existing stuff as the provided values) and you need to be able to store arbitrary followup tags. Since the exact value of the tag only matters to the user, we don't need to store them in a non-i18nized way. Also, it seems like it would be simpler to store three separate tags instead of one tag with three colon-separated values.
yea, I was just thinking that the other day so that we could better filter on them without having the camel code know how to parse it.
Adding bug 228040 (flag status not updated in message view) and bug 228041 (UI problems) to dependency list. Dunno, maybe they should be dup'ed but then you might forget about it. Also see bug 228039 (filter on Followup flag)
Jeff, poke poke, need this for 1.2 (the change mentioned above)
danw: done in CVS, you can type your own arbitrary flags