GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 784663
Sort aliases list on save of account Properties
Last modified: 2017-07-12 09:19:53 UTC
At the moment the aliases list in mail account preferences is unsorted, and the From dropdown in the composer picks the order up from there (presumably). The sort order is then effectively "by date of alias creation", which isn't especially useful. Some form of sorting would be useful - probably either by address user portion then domain, or just by entire address.
Thanks for a bug report. I made an initial change on this recently, commit 067675be7, after which the Composer has sorted addresses. It's for 3.24.4+. It sorts the accounts based on the order in the folder tree of the Mail view and keeps aliases below their account. It doesn't sort aliases, it preserves the order from Properties. I do not want to sort them in the account Properties, I believe it's better keeping the order as is there. Extend the above mentioned change and sort also aliases might make sense. I think. Or adding reorder functionality to the account Properties? Like allow drag&drop to reorder them.
> I do not want to sort them in the account Properties, I believe it's better keeping the order as is there. Why is that? "Date alias was added" is not a good sort order, especially as time goes on (unless the user has an eidetic memory ;)) - the user will realistically refer to the existing list only to remove an alias, so to find an alias in the list there should be an obvious order, unless the list is manually sortable. > Or adding reorder functionality to the account Properties? Like allow drag&drop to reorder them. Manual sorting might be useful: Positives: * complete ordering flexibility * doesn't impose a specific alphabetisation (e.g. whether to group by domain or not) Negatives: * manual maintenance required just to have a sorted list * drag and drop will be fiddly for a long list, unless the box height is increased. I think manual reordering might tip too far towards "too many options"; I'd personally lean towards automatic alphabetical sorting by entire email address, and sorting the list everywhere (composer and prefs): Foo <anexample@mydomain.com> anexample@otherdomain.com otherexample@mydomain.com Bar <otherexample@otherdomain.com> From a UI point of view, alias creation/editing should then probably be modal instead of inline, since it would be confusing for the inline editable entry to suddenly jump to a different location when the user finishes editing it.
(In reply to Stephen from comment #2) > Why is that? "Date alias was added" is not a good sort order It's just the order they had been added, there is not much to be remembered by the user. That's the obvious order for the account Properties as well (see below). > From a UI point of view, alias creation/editing should then probably be > modal instead of inline That's the main disadvantage, I'm not going to add another modal dialog on top of the modal dialog. The modal sub-dialog is not the way to go. > since it would be confusing for the inline editable entry to suddenly jump > to a different location when the user finishes editing it. I agree, unexpected sort-after-value-entered is bad and leads to more confusion. Let's make it simple, keep the account Properties unchanged and sort aliases for an account based on the email address, but still keep them "under" the main address. There would not be much difference to just sort the From combo content by email address for all entries, but it's not the case at the moment (see my previous comment).
> there is not much to be remembered by the user It's not about remembering, it's about finding. When the alias list is quite long, the whole list has to be manually searched to find an alias to delete (the user is not going to remember when they added them after a while). Having a sorted list will make it much easier. > That's the main disadvantage Agreed. Just sort when committing the values to disk then - while still in Properties, the new aliases will just appear at the bottom, so no UI changes needed. On next Properties open, they will be sorted. I tested by manually adding an alias to the .sources file with Properties closed, and on next Properties open it appeared in the list, so looks like closing Properties with "OK" ~= writing to file, so you could just add a sort step at that point. The other advantage is you may not have to do another sort for the From dropdown since they're already sorted per account on disk. I'm making some assumptions here about the way aliases are kept up-to-date within a running Evolution of course ;)
I like the idea of sorting them on commit of the changes, that's a very nice compromise. Created commit 5c6dacd in evo master (3.25.4+) Created commit 4da0364 in evo gnome-3-24 (3.24.4+)