Thunderbird2:FolderViews
Tracked by: bug 251296
Design Overview
Objectives
The primary objectives of this project are to:
- Allow the user to make better use of screen real estate by choosing which folders to see in the folder pane.
Background
Many users, especially power users, have a large number of accounts and/or folders. Adding saved searches adds to the number of folders in the folder pane. Having a lot of folders forces users to scroll to see which folders have new mail, and to open folders.
Also, if you have limited screen real estate, using the "wide view" layout, which has a short folder pane, can increase the amount of the screen used to display messages. The wide view layout puts a premium on displaying a limited number of folders.
Microsoft Outlook has the concept of favorite folders, where you designate folders as "favorites" and they show up in a group at the top of the folder pane. We would like to give the user more flexibility.
Front End Design
Currently, by clicking on the folder name column, you can cycle between four different folder views:
- All Folders
- Folders With Unread Messages
- Favorite Folders
- Most Recently Used folders
A folder's "favorite" status is set/cleared via the folder context menu.
I would like to see a folder drop down menu to choose between folder views, instead of having to cycle through the views.
Scott has proposed just having two views, All Folders, and Smart Folders. Smart Folders would be a combination of the Favorites, MRU folders, and Folders with unread, plus some automatically created virtual folders that might appear based on some context, e.g., if you tag a message, we might create a virtual folder of all the messages with that tag.