GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 323037
Folder emblem to show new mail arrival
Last modified: 2009-06-09 18:15:41 UTC
Description of Problem: When you have a bunch of unread mail from weeks ago in multiple imap folders(not everyone has time to read them all so they tend to accumulate) and new mail comes in on a folder you are not looking at, there is no way to know that new mail just arrived unless you keep track of the unread counts for all folders. I have 50 folders all with varying amounts of unread mail in them which makes that impossible for me. Thunderbird will put a * next to the folder to let me know that new mail has arrived recently in that folder since you last looked at that folder. After trying evolution on and off for 2 years I find I can not live without that feature. In evolution I have to manually scan all the folders that have unread mail in them to see if new mail has arrived. I unfortunately am currently back to using Thunderbird again. I have been checking Evolution out for the past 2 years hoping the feature would just be implemented so I finally sent an email to the discussion list and here I am with the feature request. I really want to be able to use Evolution because of the calendaring, and integration with gnome some time in the future. Jeff at ximian summed it up like this on the discussion list and suggested putting it in a feature request: The problem is that unread mail is not necessarily the same as "newly arrived" mail. Since he keeps unread mail in each folder, the unread count doesn't help him because it doesn't distinguish between unread count and "new" count. My guess is that Mozilla-Mail uses the "*" to show which folders got new mail delivered into them since the last send&receive check. Evolution doesn't currently have this functionality, but I suppose it might be a nice feature to have. Feel free to add it to bugzilla as a feature request.
New mail notification added in 2.12 should help you. Did you get time to try out current stable version 2.22.3, thanks.
I have 2.12.3 installed from Fedora Core 8 and the new mail notifications do not help. If I am away from my desk or distracted in some other way for a few minutes I will miss the notifications. Even if I did notice it though I have a ton of folders that I need to keep an eye on but sometimes delay looking at them until an hour or so later. The * scheme described above allows me to just look at the folder list on the left side and see which ones have new unread mail since the last time I looked in each folder(regardless of the unread mail count). I suspect if a folder could turn into a different icon (with a star) in it like thunderbird does when new mail arrives since the last time you looked at that folder then other users would see how extremely helpful this small feature helps them when managing a lot of folders. Evolution just doesn't work well for me personally with my huge list of folders because of this missing feature.
I didn't realize I had 2 accounts here. I posted the previous reply with an account I no longer use.
Created attachment 133557 [details] [review] proposed evo patch for evolution; I would show such icon even on folders which didn't have any unread mail in it, as I do not expect you remember folders without any unread mail any better than any folder with them.
Can you post a screenshot?
Created attachment 133567 [details] [review] proposed evo patch ][ for evolution; err, forgot of the selected folders, not setting them with the flag. Screenshot, hmm, depends on your theme. Imagine a folder-new icon, but with the dot at the bottom-right, not top-right.
Created attachment 133572 [details] shot not intrusive, I may say
What's wrong with just using folder-new? Also, I'm trying to get us away from manual pixbuf compositing.
Oh, I see. You're compositing over the inbox icon too, so folder-new wouldn't work there. If we're going down this road, I'd rather we start using GIcons and GEmblems in the folder tree instead of raw pixbufs. I've already changed the folder tree to use named icons on kill-bonobo, but I could easily adapt it to use GIcon. Also, I'm trying very hard to kill e-icon-factory.c. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea. Would just rather do some cleaning in EMFolderTree before extending it further.
Created attachment 133573 [details] [review] proposed evo patch ]I[ for evolution; Err, yet the last version, finally the correct one. I always found something wrong on the previous approach (for example Outbox, when sending emails, left the dot over it even when sent. Quite similar things can cause filters, thus tracking counts properly now). With respect to your comments: just notice I do not use the full size of the emblem, only half of it. The reason for moving right-bottom is to distinguish (even only for ~8 pixels) between folder-new and this tag. I'm only afraid that this will be hanging around for another year, or even better will be replaced by something "new", but very similar what I did, like the size of attachments, which I did quite same, with a feature of encoded size calculation, but the patch was dropped anyway. Things happen. No arguing about that. :)
(In reply to comment #10) > ... like the size of attachments, which I did quite same, with a feature of > encoded size calculation, but the patch was dropped anyway. Things happen. No > arguing about that. :) Where's that at? I either didn't realize or forgot you had such a patch.
(In reply to comment #11) > Where's that at? I either didn't realize or forgot you had such a patch. bug #257068
Sorry for the useless chatter but I am so excited to see some activity on this feature request I just couldn't resist the temptation. Thanks for working on this guys. I am still stuck with thunderbird and look forward to the day I can finally make the switch to evolution no matter how long it takes.
Honestly, I temp to commit this. I have it reverted in my sources, but because I still didn't compile, it's there. Dots on the folder icon. It looks very nice ;) By the way, do not expect storing this between evolution sessions.
hrm, actually, opening evo will mark all folders with new messages as new folders
OK, easy, defaulting to ~((unsigned int)0), instead of 0, fixes it. (And uncovers bug with wrongly saved unread counts in summary. But that's out of scope of this bug anyway.)
Marking as kill-bonobo, but please do not forget of the above simple change not worthing a resend. Thanks.
Created attachment 135598 [details] [review] Revised patch Updated Milan's patch for current git master. Just adapted it to render the "new" emblem using GIcon/GEmblem instead of manually overlaying GdkPixbufs. Nice job. I really like this!
I was going to resend it myself today, but you were quicker. Patch looks good, please commit to master.
Committed to master (Milan's still the author): http://git.gnome.org/cgit/evolution/commit/?id=de681d39eb1980215c71de9b338e24d0031c0d27
*** Bug 212414 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***