GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 346200
"Send/Receive" label implies it could send emails - consider "Get Mail"
Last modified: 2017-09-01 13:32:31 UTC
Outlook and evolution both use send / receive as the button used to process any pending actions, this is useful if you want to defer sending until later for instance when you are not connected to the internet, however with network manager to inform on network connectivity and immediate sending (queuing until network manager tells us we're online) it seems more logical to me to use a "get mail" button like thunderbird rather than send/receive which could also confuse some new users, specifically the send word can confuse users who are asked to "send a new email", the new word is key but the send word is first. Other information: I believe this has been mentioned by other sources as a usability issue.
Created attachment 68264 [details] [review] A simple testcase This patch is simple, removes the need for accelorators (F9 already applies, so alt-S or alt-R are already redundant), also changes the label to Get Mail, which in my opinion is far more intuitive.
"All controls with labels should have access keys, and frequently-used menu items should be assigned shortcut keys." taken from http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/input-keyboard.html please do not remove accelerators, they are needed for accessibility issues.
Adding the maintainer to CC ;-)
I think I remember years ago Nat mentioning this in a usability study. Users clicking on the "Send" part of "Send / Receive" to send a new mail. Any further thoughts? I guess we'd have to pick a new icon...
This is something already fixed in SLED 10 take a look at betterdesktop.org for the studies which revealed the problem.
Why is it only fixed in SLED 10?
Not sure, but in SLED 10 it says Get Mail, not send/receive.
/me glares at srag
Yep Matt, OpenSUSE ships 'Get Mail'. IIRC, community had some objections when me/harish proposed it and it never made. But yeah, Nat was all for changing 'Send/Receive'.
Google tells me you guys made the change in April 2006, but I couldn't find any discussion of it on the GNOME mailing lists in the months prior. I'm just curious what the objections were. Is this archived publicly anywhere? Frankly, I like the idea. :)
It was in e-h some time back. May be March-June 2005 or so.
Got it, or at least part of it: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-hackers/2005-August/msg00024.html I got the impression there was a larger discussion elsewhere but I think I got the gist of it. Lots of blame placed on the "New" button, which I somewhat agree with. My biggest problem with the "New" button/menu is "New" is not a verb. "Create" might be better, but... I don't know. I suppose that's been suggested. I had an idea in some other bug for turning File -> Send / Receive into a menu where you could choose to update individual accounts (which I see the need for now that I'm using POP alongside a very large IMAP account). With "Get Mail", the wording would be even nicer I think: File -> Get Mail -> Get Mail for All Accounts (F9) ------------------------------- Get Mail for Home Get Mail for Work Get Mail for Some Other Account ... Incidentally, "Flush Outbox", which I didn't even freakin' KNOW about until I rewrote the menus for kill-bonobo, should really show up in the main menu somewhere. Many under "Get Mail"...
Nice :) Flush Outbox, was my pet hack. Lots of time, I send mail and want to go off and keeps there. So I use to click send/recv and cancel all, so I hacked up. Yeah, I never bothered to put in the main menu. May be double click of outbox should do the same again.
Given Karl's point about NetworkManager helping to automate the transmission of outgoing mail, having a "File -> Flush Outbox" might be sufficient rationale for dropping the notion of sending from "Send / Receive", and therefore making a stronger argument for renaming it something like "Get Mail". OTOH, I feel like I'm opening a can of worms here, so I think that's about as much as I'm gonna campaign for it.
This is a very old item. The button is still labled Send & Receive Email in Evolution 3.10. The hint text is: Send new items and retrieve new items. Considering varying data transmission charges (eg. mobile broadband), it seems like it would be useful to let the user control when outgoing mail is sent, for instance email with large attachments. This is opposed to allowing Network Manager to always trigger outbound delivery when a connection is up.
I'm closing this and keeping it Send/Receive. Clicking the button on the tool bar truly does both, then one can either click the arrow beside it and choose which account or what action (including Flush Outbox, which is useful when sending through Outbox (an option in Composer preferences)) to do, or use File->Send/Receive menu. The 'Get Mail' would be inaccurate.