Thunderbird:Folder Pane

This page is for exploring the Thunderbird Folder Pane, the left most pane in the standard Thunderbird interface which currently holds the different account and folder information.

Objective

Simplify the folder pane view from an account centric layout to mailbox centric layout.

Add the Thunderbird:Message Archive special folder.

Add Thunderbird:Smart Folders that span accounts.

Current

The current folder pane breaks up mail by the different accounts, each with their own set of special folders: inbox, sent mail, drafts, and trash

For example:

+---------------------------+
|                           |
| [+] account@example.com   |
|                           | 
| [-] account@example1.com  |
|  |--Inbox                 |
|  |--Trash                 |
|  |--Sent                  |
|  |--Folder 123            |
|  +--Smart Folder X        |
|                           |
| [-] Local Folders         |
|  |--Inbox                 |
|  |--Trash                 |
|  |--Unsent                |
|  |--Sent                  |
|  +--Drafts                |
|                           |
+---------------------------+

Each account duplicates at least an Inbox and Trash folder, plus possibly other duplicate special folders.

Related Bugs

bug 446306 — 'New Mailbox centric folder pane'

This is the bug that will be tracking the work on this improvement.

Related Systems

• Mail.app uses a similar system for displaying mailboxes and accounts

Paneful Steps

Here are the incremental steps that build towards a finalized version of the new folder pane. Because we know now that we don't know everything we need to know we are building in steps to learn as we progress.

Step 1

First we begin with email.

We need a list of special folders with their accounts as child objects.

• Inbox
• Drafts
• Starred (icon)
• Sent Mail
• Junk
• Trash

Each special folder is a cumulative of all the accounts. If you have three accounts, each with 1 new message in the Inbox then your special Inbox will display 3 new messages. (i.e. Inbox (3) )

When looking at the Inbox folder you will see a merge of all mail new and old from all accounts which are children of the Inbox sorted by date.

This view also requires a list of accounts in order to display the sub-folders for each account. The account listing should be in a separate tree spaced below the special folders list. Each Account expands to show all the folders available that are not special folders.

Accounts listed are not cumulative totals, meaning they don't add up the unread messages in sub-folders and display the total. When expanded each fold may show a count of the unread messages contained within the folder.

Clicking on an Account top level should display the current account settings / overview page.

+----------------------+
| [+] Inbox            |
| [+] Drafts           |
| [+] Starred          |
| [-] Sent Mail        |
|  |--¤ Gmail          |
|  |--¤ Mozilla        |
|  +--¤ Rogers         |
|                      |
| [+] Junk             |
| [+] Trash            |
|                      |
|                      |
| [+] Gmail            |
| [+] Mozilla          |
| [-] Rogers           |
|  |-- My Folder (1)   |
|  +-- My Other Folder |
|                      |
+----------------------+

Step 2

Next step? Lets learn from our first iteration.

Some Possible Steps:

• Archive
• Smart Folders
• Unsent Messages
• Fit Old Folder Pane in a tree view

Outbox

As of the inclusion of bug 387656 the Unsent folder has been renamed to Outbox. With this new folder pane view we'll only be displaying the Outbox as needed by the system.

If there are unsent messages sitting in the outbox it should appear just below the Inbox bold and with a count of the number of messages pending delivery.

+----------------------+
| [+] Inbox            |
| [+] *Outbox (2)*     |
| [+] Drafts           |
| [+] Starred          |
| [+] Sent Mail        |
|                      |
| .................... |
+----------------------+

Once the messages pending delivery have been sent, the outbox should change from bold to normal font and then remove itself from the list.

+----------------------+
| [+] Inbox            |
| [+] Outbox           |
| [+] Drafts           |
| [+] Starred          |
| [+] Sent Mail        |
|                      |
| .................... |
+----------------------+

+----------------------+
| [+] Inbox            |
| [+] Drafts           |
| [+] Starred          |
| [+] Sent Mail        |
|                      |
| .................... |
+----------------------+

Smart Folders

At some point we're going to want to add our new cross-account smart folders.

+----------------------+
| [+] Inbox            |
| [+] Drafts           |
| [+] Starred          |
| [-] Sent Mail        |
|  |--¤ Gmail          |
|  |--¤ Mozilla        |
|  +--¤ Rogers         |
|                      |
| [+] Spam             |
| [+] Trash            |
|                      |
| [+] Gmail            |
| [+] Mozilla          |
| [+] Rogers           |
|                      |
| /Clever Bird/        |
| » Mail from David    |
| » Mail from Dan      | 
| » People I Know      |
| » Recent Mail        |
| » Last 5 Days        |
| » All Mail           |
| » Has Attachments    |
|                      |
+----------------------+

Archive

This is a future step that requires our new Thunderbird:Message Archive to be partially implemented. At such a point which there is a special Archive folder then we will be adding the Archive special folder to our list.

+----------------------+
| [+] Inbox            |
| [+] Drafts           |
| [+] Starred          |
| [+] Archive          |
|  |--¤ Gmail          |
|  |--¤ Mozilla        |
|  +--¤ Rogers         |
|                      |
| [-] Sent Mail        |
|  |--¤ Gmail          |
|  |--¤ Mozilla        |
|  +--¤ Rogers         |
|                      |
| [+] Spam             |
| [+] Trash            |
|                      |
| [+] Gmail            |
| [+] Mozilla          |
| [+] Rogers           |
|                      |
+----------------------+

Single Account

For users with a single email account it won't be necessary to break out the single account as a child of the mailboxes. Each special folder can be a top level folder without any children.

example:

Inbox (3)
Drafts (1)
Sent Mail

[+] Gmail

Not this:

[-] Inbox (3)
 |-- Gmail (3)
[+] Drafts (1)
[+] Sent Mail

[+] Gmail

Even the folders for the account can be represented in the main view can be at the top level for a single account. So instead of the [+] Gmail as above examples indicate we could just flatten out the folders into the view.

example:

Inbox (3)
Drafts (1)
Sent Mail

Folder 1
Folder 2