I think we looked at this when it was published anyway.  A bunch of the
ideas were just out of scope at the time.

> I just read this article and would like to comment on the individual
> ideas. Some of them are pretty good. Others are OK, but have some
> simple flaws. I'll take their ideas in order, as they come. :)
> 
> 1) Floating PIM Pane
> 
>       This is something we definately need. It shouldn't really be
>       "in" the application, per se, so much as a separate tiny desktop
>       app, itself. Something more akin to Konfabulator/Karamba would
>       be great. It would be a quick easy way to see what appointments
>       and tasks you have for the day, as well as perhaps a quick
>       summary of the amount of mail you have in selected folders. Or
>       perhaps this could also be integrated as a module for GKrellm.

Looks quite like a souped-up summary in a separate window.

> 2) Split-view Message List
> 
>       Not sure why they say "in-box" here. Inbox is the correct       english, and
> is a special folder, so unless you are dealing with
>       multiple IMAP accounts that aren't just converged into the same
>       "Inbox", such as Mail.app on OSX does things. This would
>       probably be a good thing for Evoluton to do as well, and would
>       simplify the UI a whole lot. Adding multiple trees for e-mail
>       folders at the top of the UI would not be hard to do, but could
>       be rather ueseless without the new-style Outlook list widget.

I'm not so keen on this one.  Mainly because its already a bit of a task
fitting enough useful information in the list for it to be usable.  And
then you also have the user-interface ambiguity of which pane is
currently active etc.  e.g. see the way unfocussed message-lists still
display the selected message which matches the one displayed below.

> 3) Built-in Instant Messaging
> 
>       This really doesn't belong in a groupware client. The proper
>       thing to do, would be to provide the necessary integration with
>       an external IM client. Or, more preferrably, have a standard way

Yeah, evo plugins? ...  They also come up with some odd stuff like an
online buggon 'only if they use your client'.  Which seems pretty bunk -
what do they mean, you have the IM implemented directly as part of the
app, ignoring all other IM protocols and directories?

And yeah, what about video/phone conferencing?

> 4) Calendar-linked Auto-reply
> 
>       This sounds really neat. I would love to see something like this
>       go into Evolution. It probably wouldn't be very hard to do,
>       either, especially with the calendar abstraction and nice
>       filters.

Well ...
 - often you don't care if they're there or not, otherwise you'd phone
them up/im them, and getting a mail to say they wont reply for a few
hours might just be more noise than signal.
 - it could divulge otherwise personal information you didn't want to
(i.e. am i at home/in my office)
 - if you do the IM thing, then it just duplicates the same
functionality it could provide (and you may indeed be mailing them
because they're away from their IM client ...).

> 6) Spam Auto-reporting
> 
>       Evolution can be integrated very easily with spamassassin which
>       can do pretty much everything listed here. The only place where
>       an issue of integration stands, is with providing a nice UI to
>       do the Bayesian classification, and manual spam reporting, as
>       well as white/black-listing addresses and things. Though I would
>       love to see us get some UI in for this, with a backend
>       abstraction, to allow those people who want to use bogofilter or
>       something else, for their filtering. It would not be that hard
>       to do, either.

If we did some plugin system it would be easy to do, if only we had one.

> 7) Mouseover Contact Information
> 
>       Adding the ability to pop up a tooltip with basic information
>       from a VCard, when the mouse is over an address in the "Sender"
>       column is pretty simple. Extending on what was said in the
>       article, we could pull a VCard attachment from the mail, if the
>       person is not in your addressbook, and the mail has a vcard
>       attachment.

What happens when you mouse-over a multiple address field and one which
doesn't fit on screen?

> 8) Smart E-Mail Notification
> 
>       This is something that I hope I can do some things for, for the
>       2.0 release of Evolution. The ideas in this article, are
>       something that would be easy to do. The "Important" thing,
>       depends on the mailer getting support for priority flag headers,
>       though. Hopefully, I can get an external app to handle this,
>       written pretty soon.

Naah you could just use the existing label system.  And use filters to
do the marking.  Whats the external app needed for?

> 9) All-powerful Right-clicking
> 
>       Evolution already does pretty much all of this. Evolution also
>       has VFolders, which doesn't actually move the mail, so the
>       menus are more bulky than typical. Even without the VFolders,
>       the context menus are still pretty large. I think it a better
>       idea to work on simplifying the UI as much as possible. The
>       context menus can still be powerful, even without as much stuff
>       in them.

This is always a two edged sword, if you put too much into the context
menu, it becomes less usable.

> Bonus) P2P Document Sharing
> 
>       This is probably done better with some combination/integration
>       method with Rendezvous, MultiSync, and possible one of the open
>       p2p protocols.

Versioning and so forth would be neat.  But this sounds like a much
bigger problem than should be pushed into a mailer (i presume it uses
email as the transport protocol).



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