Be more conservative about sidebar number badges

[Danielle Foré]

At the moment, every sidebar entry seems to be able to have sidebar badges. This is very distracting and not particularly useful, imo.

Overall, I feel like sidebar badges are a call to action. They alert me that some action needs to be taken inside a folder. For things like "Inbox" and "Drafts" this is very important information. However, for many folders, there is no action to be taken.

For example: Trash, Sent, Starred, and Spam all alert me. While I guess spam is kind of arguable, if I'd trashed something, sent something, or starred something, I think it's safe to assume that no further immediate action needs to be taken. The message has been "sorted" at this point.

[Jim Nelson (yorba-jim)]

Do you mean the icon beside the folder name? Or the number to the right of the folder name?

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

The badges aligned to the right of the source list

[Jim Nelson (yorba-jim)]

The unread message count is a kind of call to action, at least it is for some people. Not every user has email flowing directly into their Inbox which they then manually sort into folders. Plenty use server-side filtering. These unread message counts indicate when new messages have arrived (or there are "things to do" for people who use unread that way).

Gmail shows unread counts in its sidebar, but it uses a text number (i.e. "Connections (6)") rather than a drawn badge. We did that early on in Geary; it looked ugly.

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

Hey Jim, I think we're agreeing about what the badge means, but not what that implies :p

I feel like having 160 "todo" items in my trash is a little counter-intuitive. Even taking into account filters (of which I do have a few), I think that by setting up a filter to automatically trash certain types of mail means I'm not really concerned with reading those mails.

I'm also really confused about how/why I could possibly have unread messages (or "todo" items or however you'd like to refer to them) in my "Sent" folder. My only guess is that Geary is picking up unread messages in conversations that I'm involved in. Which again, I think is a little counter-intuitive since I'm looking in my "Sent" folder for things that I have sent, not really for unread messages in a conversation.

This may only be a problem for someone like my that has a very very high volume of mail. But I find the current situation extremely distracting. It's kind of stressful to see that I have almost 13,000 things that need my attention in "All Mail" (which I believe is my archive? But I'm really not sure what "All Mail" means).

For what it's worth, it looks like (out of the default tags/folders) only "Inbox" "Drafts" and "Spam" show unread message counts in Gmail, in addition of course to custom tags/folders.

To be clear, my concern isn't about visual design :) Just about only showing these badges in places where my attention is actually required.

[Cassidy James Blaede (cassidyjames)]

One possible solution (that I believe Gmail might do) is to not shoe badges for all unread messages, but only for “unseen” ones—that is, unread messages you haven’t seen the subjects of. So if my Inbox has 112 new mails, and I skim through the list seeing if anything looks urgent, those messages have been “seen” but not read. I know they exist, so I probably don’t need a badge showing me they exist.

I also agree with Dan that showing unread messages in my Sent folder is confusing, but that might be a different issue.

[Jim Nelson (yorba-jim)]

Just to get everyone on the same page: the number Geary is displaying is returned by the IMAP server. It represents unread messages in that folder only (not unread messages drawn into conversations in the folder). Geary is not generating this number because Geary doesn't necessarily have the entire mailstore downloaded to the local database.

Cassidy, I have seen the subjects of every message in my Inbox but Gmail continues to show an unread count beside my Inbox folder. I'm not sure what you're seeing different.

Regarding Sent Mail, doing things like marking a conversation unread and then archiving it will mark a sent message as unread if it's in the conversation.

It sounds like the suggestion here is to limit the places the unread count is shown to Inbox, Drafts, and Spam, in addition to the user's labels. That's entirely reasonable. I would also add the Outbox so the user knows when a message is sending. I would still keep the sidebar tooltip that displays the total and the unread counts for each folder regardless.

I've filed this at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=738257

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

That sounds like a great compromise. Thank you Jim!