Open latest message instead of Evolution window when clicking

[Juha Siltala]

When the user clicks on the indicator after receiving email, Evolution comes to the foreground. Mail-notification has a nice option to open the latest message instead, in a single message window. This should be either default or optional in incicator-applet.

[Eitan Isaacson (eeejay)]

I agree that this would be nice. Right now my broken workflow looks like this.
1. Be notified by notify-osd of a new message (no subject sender or elipsized body included).
2. Click on Evolution server in indicator-applet.
3. See "urgent hint" for evolution in taskbar (evolution is in another workspace).
4. Click task bar evolution item, evolution window is activated/focused (workspace is switched).
5. Scroll down messages list.
6. Select new mail.

With the mail-notification package, I was able to see the subject and sender, and immediately show the message, delete it or mark as read.

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Eitan Isaacson wrote:
> I agree that this would be nice. Right now my broken workflow looks like this.
> 1. Be notified by notify-osd of a new message (no subject sender or elipsized body included).
> 2. Click on Evolution server in indicator-applet.
> 3. See "urgent hint" for evolution in taskbar (evolution is in another workspace).
> 4. Click task bar evolution item, evolution window is activated/focused (workspace is switched).
> 5. Scroll down messages list.
> 6. Select new mail.
>
> With the mail-notification package, I was able to see the subject and
> sender, and immediately show the message, delete it or mark as read.
>

I agree, the email notification should include some sort of condensed
sender / subject / body in the case where there are few new emails (no
more than 3, I'd say). More than that, and I only want to see "5 new
emails".

Mark

[Neil J. Patel (njpatel)]

I agree that this would be nice to have, but I think this should be a feature request for karmic. Evolution-indicator already extends the functionality of the plugin it replaced, and mail-notification is actually another program that's available in the repos (not to be confused with the mail-notification-plugin that ships with evolution).

The reason that evolution-indicator doesn't so this already (and lord knows, I tried), is that Evolutions plugin api does not allow for us to get this information. We'd need to mimic mail-notification, which does some horrible stuff to get to that information (like loading in a separate instance of your mail folders into memory, afaict).

I do want this functionality, but I think it's worth working with the Evolution team to do it right. Even so, if it's critical, I can spend some more time on this and try and do what mail-notification has done.

[Juha Siltala (topyli)]

On Wed, 2009-04-01 at 14:07 +0000, Neil J. Patel wrote:

> I do want this functionality, but I think it's worth working with the
> Evolution team to do it right. Even so, if it's critical, I can spend
> some more time on this and try and do what mail-notification has done.

Are there two issues here?

1) Showing some header information (sender, subject) in the applet, and
2) Opening the latest message in a message window instead of focusing
the full Evolution window?

My request was for the latter only, although it would indeed be nice to
have a little preview of what the message is about.

--
Juha Siltala

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Neil, this is not needed for 9.04. I agree with your proposal to engage
with the Evolution team to expose the needed information to plugins, and
would ask that you add that to the detailed plan for 9.10
notifications-and-indicators.

I would also suggest that the "last n emails" be exposed in the
messaging indicator on the same basis that we are exposing the "last n
people who signed in in the previous 3 minutes" from Pidgin. In other
words, it remains a quick way for you to respond to a specific notification.

The two use cases are similar:

 * I see a notification that Jane signed in, I open a new conversation
with Jane in Pidgin immediately
 * I see a new message from Jack, I open that message directly immediately

Both are semi-ephemeral (hey, do we need a new word there? semipheral?)
in that they allow me to respond to that event for a short while, after
that they blend into the background and I would "go to the inbox and
reply to the mail there" or "go to the buddy list and start the
conversation from there".

Mark

[TonyKnott (tonyknott-deactivatedaccount)]

How's the progress in the issues reported here going? It seems that this bug should be broken in three:

1 - allow notifications to display ellipsized subjects instead of simply "X new emails"

2 - allow the indicator applet to show messages themselves besides inbox names

3 - allow the indicator applet to open messages directly instead of requiring to open the mail client

I'd also like to mention Bug #479218 that I just reported and is slightly related.