GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 311002
right click menu item "filter messages" missing
Last modified: 2005-08-21 00:00:25 UTC
Former versions of evolution had a right click menu "filter messages" (I don't recall the exact wording). evolution-2.2.2 as shipped with FC4 doesn't have it anymore. I am now forced to resort to the non-obvious "Ctrl Y". As I am extensively filtering mail into folders, this to me is a severe usability regression to former versions of evolution. Other information:
the release of evolution-2.2 was the first round of cleaning up the heavily overloaded evolution menus. there were *many* things in the context menu you refer to - about 20 items or so? well, definitely too many. so some had to go. me personally don't think that it's too hard to learn "ctrl+y". sometimes it's even better, at least if you're using the keyboard after filtering anyway, it's easier then switching from mouse to keyboard, but that's only one case... (i'm not a developer and i don't want to convince you of anything, i just try to explain why that decision was made). so i'm mire than sure that this is a "WON'T FIX", sorry. there have been quite a few reports here in bugzilla around, everybody complaining about a menu item that has been removes from the context menu, everybody had his own favourite menu item removed. ...but somewhere one has to make the cut. :-/ if you're still not content, feel free to reopen this bug. ...or you can always patch the source to get it back in if you're a bit into compiling programs... :-)
> so i'm mire than sure that this is a "WON'T FIX", sorry. there have been quite a > few reports here in bugzilla around, everybody complaining about a menu item > that has been removes from the context menu, everybody had his own favourite > menu item removed. > ...but somewhere one has to make the cut. :-/ Then please draw your conclusions: You have gone too far, instead of improving usability, you are crippling applications.
our UI lab is doing real-world usability testing and if they removed it, I'm sure there must have been a reason for it. FWIW, it's still in the main menus.
Then your UI lab probably has failed or its tests have not been broad enough. Some food for thought: How often do you filter your Inbox on an IMAP account? I guess, I do so at least once per hour, sometimes even often. How often do you manually copy or move mails from your Inbox to another? With many filters activated (I have ca. 50), I very rarely do so, because most unfiltered mail either is spam (I react with "Mark as junk" or "Delete") or unusual/unregular mail, I typically leave sitting in my Inbox until I once clean it up. Furthermore, in an ideal world, context sensitive right click menus would be user customizable short-cuts to "frequent tasks", and would not be hard coded at all.
perhaps novell's UI lab has seen the majority of users, and you are not part of it? don't know... :-) i filter my imap inbox every ten minutes, because i have enabled "apply filters on new messages in inbox on this server" in the preferences - so i don't care at all about context menu items or such things. i don't filter manually at all - that's my ideal world. :-) my two cents.
> perhaps novell's UI lab has seen the majority of users, and you are not part of > it? don't know... :-) Well, have you ever heard the sentence "catering the majority means pissing off the minorities"? The point you are missing: The majority of user uses Windows and doesn't care about Evolution or GNOME. So if you agree to your argument above, if you should quit working on Evo or GNOME. > i filter my imap inbox every ten minutes, because i have enabled "apply filters > on new messages in inbox on this server" in the preferences I try to do the same, but evolution has proven to work reliable enough on filtering the IMAP Inbox. I guess it's a polling vs. event driven issue. Seems to me as if Evo's filtering doesn't work reliable on event driven access to IMAP folders.
i know that sentence. so what? it's open source. patch if you like. you're able to do everything that you want, you cannot do that with windows and closed source. i also only care secondarily about gnome and evo, primarily i want a system that just works(TM). and i'm pretty sure that micros~1 outlook does not have about 20 items in its context menu (as it has been in evolution until 2.0.4), and i'm pretty sure that evolution develops more and more from an application that has been basically an outlook clone to a good application with good concepts. and cleaning up the menus (instead of adding tons of new items as it has been four the last four years) is one part of it. we won't find a conclusion, i guess. :-) so of course you can leave this bug open, but presumably nobody will care about it. :-/
> i also only care secondarily about gnome and evo, primarily i want a system that > just works(TM). Pardon - This is gnome's bugzilla and you don't care?
yepp, exactly. for windooze i pay money, for gnome i'm doing a bit on evolution bug triaging. so i don't care. so close this bug? ;-)
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marking this bug as a duplicate of bug 308829 *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 308829 ***