GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 520368
Set a per-folder default account for replies
Last modified: 2013-10-08 11:34:53 UTC
Someone gave me a feature request today that sounds reasonable and not too terribly difficult to implement. They wanted to configure a particular IMAP folder such that when replying to or forwarding message in that folder, the composer's From field defaults to an account of their choosing. I proposed adding an EAccountComboBox (like in the composer) to the Folder Properties dialog where you could choose a "sender" account for that folder. On the backend, may be as simple as adding a new CamelFolderInfo field [1] that gets checked before spawning a new composer window. I'm pretty sure this is not the first time I've heard such a request. [1] Preferrably a GData field to accommodate this and any other zany tags we might want to pin on a folder in the future. Would avoid further ABI breakage. Hey, GObjects have 'em...
Srini, what do you think about this from a UI standpoint?
Per account reply style is more logical than a per folder thing. What happens is 99% of the cases is that a person working in an Outlook organization would like to go for a outlook style rather than his personal style in his private accounts. Per folder thing, can be a over kill and really confusing.
I don't necessarily disagree, but in my case I have mail from mailing lists being delivered to my personal account where there is more space and I can get them more often, but I post from my work address. That means each time I reply to something I have to switch the sender box over and over again. Other clients have allowed me to set a default sender for each folder which has greatly helped with this.
Another, perhaps more GNOMEish approach is to not have an explicit preference for this at all (the fewer the better) and instead just silently remember which account was last used to reply to or forward a message from a particular folder, and default to that account when replying to or forwarding a message from that same folder in the future. Make sense? Problem is, the selected account is not very noticeable in the message composer. I don't know about you but a rarely even look at the thing when replying to an email. So the second part to this would be to warn the user before sending a message from a different account (with the requisite "don't bug me again" checkbox, of course). I agree with Srini that this type of thing can easily be confusing if not done right. Do you think this approach would still be confusing?
It would be a little confusing, but perhaps less than a config option. I just thought of another use case. Subscribing to mailing lists with an alias, and wanting to post with that alias.
Bumping version to a stable release.
*** Bug 269745 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 215115 ***