On 23 Mar 2018, at 11:37, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:
On 22 Mar 2018, at 14:35, Eric Sharakan wrote:
[due dates]
Just for the record, I consider this the same feature as when asked
about postponing or snoozing messages. Some times [“tickler
(file)”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickler_file) is used (which
I kind of like) and even “discard” (temporarily). There are
probably more names. Some times the services followup.cc and Sanebox
are also mentioned.
So I understand the concept of postponing messages, as I did at one time
use a (now-defunct) iOS email client that did just that, but only for
gmail.
But what I'm asking for goes a bit further than that. I also want to be
able to preview upcoming messages, not just wait until the day they're
due for them to pop into view in some way. MailTags allows for that,
and even provides its own set of (somewhat configurable) smart mailboxes
to see messages due today, soon, or further in the future. In addition,
the messages could be color-coded by how far in the future their due
date was.
But perhaps it could be accomplished via specially formatted IMAP
keywords that look acceptable to IMAP but can be parsed as dates by
MM?
The problem with IMAP keywords are that they are often limited in how
many can exist on a given server (and some times they are not
supported at all, but I don't worry to much about that as long as the
feature still works locally).
Every time I'm asked about this feature I give it some more thought
and I've got quite a lot of notes about it. It *can* be done using
IMAP keywords, but it has to be smart about it. The following is how I
*think* it could be implemented, but I haven't done anything yet and I
make no promises. It's also very technical and basically just me
thinking out loud. Maybe someone has something interesting to add :)
Apple uses a nice trick for colored flags where up to 8 different
colors can be specified using 3 IMAP keywords. These flags are named
`$MailFlagBit0`, `$MailFlagBit1` and `$MailFlagBit2` and the
“trick” is to use them as the bits of a number.
I didn't realize those were just named keywords; I actually thought
there was an available bitfield they were utilizing. To mimic Apple
Mail's fags submenu, I had created a set of smart mailboxes named for
the various colors Apple used, with the condition being the appropriate
combination of those three keywords. That is, until I learned about the
flags>>color condition you had made available. :-)
The same could be done using `$TicklerBit0`-`$TicklerBitX`, but the
problem is that much larger numbers are needed depending on the
“base” of the number. This could be solved by having a separate
value defining the base such as $TicklerMinutes, $TicklerHours, and
$TicklerDays (this could be a bit pattern too, but I think that's
overkill). I think this would reduce the need for IMAP keywords to a
set of around 8 in most cases.
This seems like a reasonable approach.
In addition to this, it might be worth considering to offer the user
to also automatically move these emails into a separate IMAP folder,
e.g., named “Tickler File” in each IMAP account.
I believe this is part of how the now-defunct "Mailbox" iOS email client
did its magic.
Each subfolder should be named after the original mailbox of the
emails within the mailbox. When the time is up then MailMate can move
the emails back based on the mailbox name. There would also be a need
for doing this atomically if there are multiple active installations
of MailMate. (I think I've figure out how to do this as well.)
Alternatively (or optionally), emails with tickler-values could just
be hidden from display, but this would only work well in MailMate and
not if using a tickler-unaware email client, e.g., on an iPhone.
FWIW, I'm not overly concerned with having a way to see messages with
tickler dates attached in other email clients. :-)
-Eric
Have a nice weekend :)
--
Benny
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