New folder options: Auto-purge, Learn as, Hidden

[robmueller]

They're on the beta server. A quick summary before I have to get going...

Auto-purge

Pretty obvious, you specify a number of days, and messages older than that number of days are automatically PERMANENTLY deleted.

The purge process only runs every 24 hours, so don't expect it to be immediate.

Also it won't purge any "flagged" messages, a neat hack if you want to force keeping of specific messages

Learn as

Again you specify what message type the folder contains, and messages in that folder will be learnt to your bayes db.

Again the learn process only runs every 24 hours, so don't expect it to be immedate.

Hidden

You can hide a folder in the web interface. This only affects the folder tree on the Mailbox screen, nothing else (eg folder list on define rules screen, etc)

You can hide always, or based on having no unread messages.

If any sub-folder is visible, then the parent folder will also be visible. eg you can't create orphaned sub-folders.

That's about it, it's on the beta server, have a play and see how it looks.

Rob

[janusz]

A nice idea ... I've set some of these options on some folders in my free account and will watch how/whether they work.

[Chipper]

Wow!! Lots of nice stuff -- thanks Rob/FM Team!

A couple things:

1) The properties section is really "busy" -- is is possible to have an option to be either:
* Same display as it is now
* Columnar (would have to horizontally scroll left/right)

2) Auto purge: I create folders/personalities for different organizations I belong to. Example:
* Church stuff:
-- Folder name = church
-- personality = chipper.church AT myname DOT mm DOT st
-- mail sent to/from that personality gets filed into that folder
-- If I'm in that folder, default is that personality and it's filed in that folder
So... if there were the same options for auto purge (sent or recvd 1, 2, 3, 7, 14, etc days). Added note: I personally would not use auto purge, but just am throwing this suggestion out to others that might.

Overall, I like what you're doing here!

[brong]

Ah, yes - that's another one I couldn't think of earlier today when Rob asked if I had any other ideas... "view as Sent Items" - switching to displaying the "To" rather than "From".

[Abydos]

Loving the Auto Purge feature!


Like that it can be set to 180 days (if for no other reason than to help avoid this civil liberties fiasco):

After 180 days in the U.S., email messages lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and become just another database record.

[Misha]

Originally Posted by robmueller

They're on the beta server. A quick summary before I have to get going...
Learn as

Again you specify what message type the folder contains, and messages in that folder will be learnt to your bayes db.

Again the learn process only runs every 24 hours, so don't expect it to be immedate.

Great! Thanks, Rob!

A quick question - I assume that when a folder is trained as spam/non-spam by the method, the messages are otherwise untouched. That is - if a folder full of messages is reported as spam, those messages won't be moved into the "junk mail" folder, as if I'd hand-trained them as spam using the web interface.

Is that correct?

[JRobert]

Originally Posted by brong

Ah, yes - that's another one I couldn't think of earlier today when Rob asked if I had any other ideas... "view as Sent Items" - switching to displaying the "To" rather than "From".

How about: for all folders, show the correspondent (whichever one is not 'me') and a sent / received flag? That would work for any folder without caring whether it's a 'sent' or a 'received' folder. It would bring with it the ability to sort a folder's contents so that all messages to & from a given address would group together.

-jeff-

[zhak]

Great work. Continuous improvement is a good thing. For some reason, I get tickled whenever I have more settings to play with, some kinda of geek-meter there...

The first thing I did was hide the Junk Mail folder (I receive zero spam). Then set auto-purge on the Trash and hid it too. Great.

The variable lengths of time for the auto-purge is nice. Some might have only given us On/off -- 30 days/never. You did more. Thanks. Set 365 days on my News folder and 31 days on Subscribed Ads.

On the folder screen, it's getting sort of crowded. You might consider only showing properties that are not the default properties.

-Jim

[znunxnyv]

Originally Posted by zhak

On the folder screen, it's getting sort of crowded. You might consider only showing properties that are not the default properties.

Great idea.

This is awesome, now I can hide the junk, trash, & sent folders.

[janusz]

Originally Posted by robmueller

Auto-purge [...] won't purge any "flagged" messages, a neat hack if you want to force keeping of specific messages

This hack (a neat one indeed) isn't mentioned in the Edit folder properties screen. I think it should be.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by robmueller

Hidden

You can hide a folder in the web interface. This only affects the folder tree on the Mailbox screen, nothing else (eg folder list on define rules screen, etc)

I was hoping it would affect the drop down lists on the "mailbox" and "view message" screen. Most of the folders I wanted to hide are subfolders of folders that are folded anyway in the folder tree. The problem is in the extremely long drop down lists that have to be scrolled until a folder is found. I use these more often than the folder tree for filing email in the proper folder after being read (or when being composed).

Originally Posted by JRobert

How about: for all folders, show the correspondent (whichever one is not 'me') and a sent / received flag? -

This is one that I want since many of my folders show "me" as the correspondent of about half the messages.

Another thing I want is to be able to see the "X-delivered-to" header value in the mailbox view (such as by hovering over something or clicking something).

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by myself

I was hoping it would affect the drop down lists on the "mailbox" and "view message" screen. Most of the folders I wanted to hide are subfolders of folders that are folded anyway in the folder tree. The problem is in the extremely long drop down lists that have to be scrolled until a folder is found....

On the other hand when the new interface will be available the folder tree might be available in the sidebar in these screens instead of the drop-downs.

For now I set some subfolders of my "in" folder (where I have incoming mail sorted by Sieve) to be visible only when new mail is in and it seems good. Unfortunately I use some of these to keep mail to be handled "later" (which never comes...) so not all can be used this way. A "show hidden" action would complete the functionality making hidden folders 2.5 clicks away.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by Chipper

1) The properties section is really "busy" -- is is possible to have an option to be either:
* Same display as it is now
* Columnar (would have to horizontally scroll left/right)

For a columnar view it would be very convenient if one could specify which columns to show (such as by checking some boxes). This would be very convenient for maintenance: like going over all folders and seeing which ones are hidden. Then going over all of them have some other property, and of course changing these. Working by property is an efficient way of doing it (It's the way I just did it, working one property at a time, choosing groups of folders, and not groups of folders at a time, setting groups of properties). Both displays are useful, depending on what one's doing.

[hadaso]

Another useful property might be to have a folder show only unread messages by default.

[brong]

Originally Posted by JRobert

How about: for all folders, show the correspondent (whichever one is not 'me') and a sent / received flag? That would work for any folder without caring whether it's a 'sent' or a 'received' folder. It would bring with it the ability to sort a folder's contents so that all messages to & from a given address would group together.

-jeff-

Tricky. You can get most of the way there by checking personalities and unwinding plus addressing/subdomain addressing on our domains, but there's still the issue
of POP retrieved messages from external accounts (you'd have to create a matching personality, and catchall addresses would be a mess).

I use mutt at home, and that allows you to use an arbitrary regular expression, but this wouldn't work for FastMail's web interface sorting because we use the SORT facilities on the IMAP backend, and it doesn't know which email addresses are you.