Hi Stuart,

This is definitely something we've talked about in the past.  In particular, 
Daniel Fore of Elementary fame has shown a great deal of interest in making 
Geary look more like a chat or SMS client than a traditional email client.  
What I don't think we've talked about in the past are the heuristics you're 
presenting here.  I'm curious, if a conversation is in SMS mode (just to give 
it a name) and then one of the participants sends a long email, would you 
imagine it then switches to conversation mode (to give it another name)?

To further lay out your idea, here's my proposal for SMS mode:

1. Fewer than 'n' participants (2, 3, 4)
2. All replies are prepended to quoted text (if any text is quoted at all), 
i.e. no inline replies.  (Could allow replies appended to quoted text too, but 
that seems increasingly uncommon these days).
3. Replies are less than a certain length (I'm willing to go beyond one 
paragraph, maybe three, and not including the signature).

SMS mode could then not display headers, but it could also completely remove 
quoted text and signatures, showing only a name, date/time, avatar, and the 
reply.

Is this in the spirit of what you're thinking?  I'm trying to think of any 
other requirements/heuristics that might be needed or useful here.

I should also point you to this ticket, which is to compress collapses messages 
in a conversation into a single blob that the user can expand at will:

http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/5137

Not exactly what you're specifying here, but also with the intent of 
simplifying the display of a long conversation.

-- Jim

On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Stuart Langridge <[email protected]> wrote:
I had this idea. Something that would be dreadfully cool in a mail 
client is this: if a mail conversation is primarily composed of 
replies which are only a paragraph or less long, and it's between two 
people (perhaps three), then collapse the conversation completely and 
show it like an SMS conversation. Totally hide all the headers, 
subjects, everything. This would make half of my email conversations 
so, so, so much easier to read. It feels like the sort of thing that 
geary could do, and it'd be a winning new thing that other clients 
don't have. 

Thoughts? 

sil 

-- 
New Year's Day -- 
everything is in blossom! 
I feel about average. 
-- Kobayashi Issa 
_______________________________________________ 
Geary mailing list 
[email protected] 
http://lists.yorba.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geary 

_______________________________________________
Geary mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.yorba.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geary

Reply via email to