Brainstorm

Bridge the gap between Modest and competing smartphone email clients

Posted on 2010-04-05 19:23 UTC by Christian Sarrasin. Status: Under consideration, Categories: Internet & Networking, Utilities, User Experience.

If Maemo/Meego is to be a serious contender in the business/smartphone arena, a decent email client should be an integral part of the offering. Compared to other platforms, such as Blackberry (obviously), but also the iPhone or even S60, the Maemo email client is seriously underpowered, even for mundane tasks.

The purpose of this brainstorm is to gather people's opinions as to the minimum features (nothing too fancy) that the default email client should offer.

Example of enhancements necessary to turn "Modest" into a useable email client:

It has no decent unread mails notification mechanism - try to use it with more than one account and you'll spend serious time hunting for your messages in multiple mailboxes (which leads on to another of its - non-functional - weaknesses: it's slow, at least against IMAP4/TLS servers)- see solution #1
Missing support IMAP-IDLE means no "push"-style email (bug 3888 was opened over a year ago and has over 150 votes as of this writing)
It's not possible to search emails (bug 5502)
It's not possible to specify that sent-items or drafts be kept on the server (already a brainstorm)
Deleting emails sometimes doesn't delete them from the IMAP server (I understand this is a bug that's about to get fixed in PR1.2 at last!!)
You cannot copy text from emails without replying to them (bug 5033)
etc etc... This query against the bugs DB turns up numerous "bugs", quite a few of which are actually very sensible enhancement requests.

My 2.5 years old 1st gen iPod touch can do most of the above and I'm sure other smartphone platforms are just as capable.

Follow-up discussions to this thread please.

Solutions for this brainstorm

Solution #1: Display number of unread messages on accounts overview screen

Posted on 2010-04-05 19:24 UTC by Christian Sarrasin.

As the title says (please refer to the following images, which are worth a thousand words):

With the current implementation, attempting to use Modest with say more than a couple of accounts, is really trying. You have to visit the accounts in succession (which is a minimum of 4 taps, not to mention the time it takes to refresh the account), in order to find where those emails you have just been notified about have vanished.

A few recent threads on 'Talk' (here and here) have left me with the impression that I'm not alone in finding it unbelievable that this extremely basic feature doesn't exist...

Solution #2: Flag emails correctly on IMAP4

Posted on 2010-04-12 23:12 UTC by David Ward.

If one replies to an email, the email should be set to "replied" and if an email is forwarded the email should be set to "forwarded"

All email clients do this. Not doing this makes it hard to follow what you have done with your emails.

Also the "important" flag should be visible so as to locate emails you have flagged on another emails client.

Solution #3: Search emails IMAP4

Posted on 2010-04-13 01:24 UTC by David Ward.

Currently one can not search their emails, either entire email cache or particular folders.

It would be a nice feature to have added in as it is very standard.

Solution #4: Unified inbox

Posted on 2010-04-15 22:37 UTC by Ian Cullinan.

Modest should have the ability to optionally display emails from different accounts in one unified inbox, like Mail.app does on OS X.

Solution #5: Sent and Draft folders for IMAP4

Posted on 2010-04-20 02:33 UTC by David Ward.

Being able to save atleast Sent Items and also Draft items to your server side folders for IMAP4 would be very useful.

This is standard on all IMAP4 clients I have used and would allow using the N900's email client like any other, rather than keeping them all local, filling up the phone and rendering those items not accessible from any other client

Solution #6: Allow me to read a new email inside 2 seconds

Posted on 2010-04-27 14:58 UTC by Eoin Ryan.

Currently, it takes about 20 seconds for me to unlock the phone (1 sec), open the email app, select inbox (1 sec), watch the spinning wheel as the phone does a fake send/receive (1 sec) and then click send/receive and wait for new messages (14 sec), select the message and wait for it to load (3 sec). I'm connecting to Google Apps on IMAP.

Let's assume that the idle download issue of IMAP mails is solved soon.

After that, I want to be able to QUICKLY read an email, decide to reply or not and then put the phone away. To allow this:

- Modest should download and preload the full text of the most recent 100 emails (I don't know if there's a technical difference between download and preload, but I mean the text is both saved to the device and loaded into the application on opening)

- The load times for both the modest application and the individual email have to be reduced drastically.

- The send/receive functionality has to work very quickly. Why does it clear out the screen and reload it, why not just load new messages?

I must admit, I have no idea how to do the things above, but I will help in any way I can. I firmly believe that they would make the email experience on the N900 something to be much prouder of.

Solution #7: Custom Folder Subscriptions

Posted on 2010-05-26 20:14 UTC by Jamie Thompson.

Almost every IMAP client I have ever used supports choosing which folders you want to subscribe to, enabliing you to filter out the things you don't need to see on a given client. Even the email client on my N95 supports this, it's pretty fundamental.

Solution #8: Saving replied (sent) mail in same folder as message

Posted on 2010-05-26 20:18 UTC by Jamie Thompson.

When replying to or forwarding a mail, the sent mail should optionally be able to be saved in the same folder as the original mail, not just a global sent mail folder. This is particularlly useful when you want your replies to appear in context (even more so when the messages are displayed in a threaded client).

Solution #9: Sort Mails

Posted on 2010-06-18 16:09 UTC by Helmuth M..

Allow to sort Mails by sender, subject and size

Solution #10: shortcut to a specific folder or message

Posted on 2010-10-10 23:33 UTC by Michael Demetriou.

Add the ability to have a shortcut on the desktop (or the widget for that matter) linked with a specific folder or thread in modest

Solution #11: Heavy Inbox

Posted on 2011-02-11 07:00 UTC by Daniel Koch.

Add possibility to clear the Inbox.

Solution #12: Filtering

Posted on 2011-03-03 23:00 UTC by Dietmar Schwertberger.

As there are many spams in my inbox, I would like to see some filtering.

E.g. download only emails from my contacts and/or from a whitelist.

Other emails should not be downloaded, but remain on the server.

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