Re: [Geary] Disabling Mark as Read Automatically

[Michael Gratton <mike vee net>]

On Fri, 1 Feb, 2019 at 1:36 AM, Axel U <ulrich axel gmail com> wrote:
> I think we need to agree that the list is a truly chronological 
> representation of messages in a conversation only, regardless of 
> where in the tree a given message may be. I would ask you to correct 
> me if it is not. With that definition however, when an action is 
> taken on a message in the middle of the conversation, marking 
> something then applies to the message the action is taken on itself 
> AND all older messages regardless of where in the tree a given 
> message resides.

This and your definitions in general are correct - Geary flattens the 
tree formed by message replies by sorting messages in the conversation 
chronologically by sent date. So my original comment, that the action 
would mark all previous messages, does also indeed apply 
chronologically.

> BTW, I have examples where Gmail web client AND Apple Mail in iOS and 
> Geary all interpret which messages make up a conversation differ.  I 
> have additionally examples where the count of unread messages in a 
> 'folder' respectively 'label' between Gmail web client and Geary 
> differ based on where in the conversation the action "Mark unread 
> from here" was taken. Very confusing.

Yeah, Geary has a few bugs relating to displaying unread counts, 
unfortunately. It's a high priority to fix, however.

> Back to the topic at hand using above definitions and abstractions.
> Re your question of how to apply "marking" to a conversation as a 
> whole:
> Like your outline:
[snip]

That all sounded about what I had in mind, yes.

> Like your naming: "Mark conversation read when replying, forwarding, 
> or archiving." as "replying" is inclusive of "reply" [to sender only] 
> and "reply all".  However, I would replace "conversation" with 
> "messages" because as proposed by you, it may not mark an entire 
> conversation if the action is taken on a message in the middle of the 
> conversation, so using the term "conversation" in the feature 
> description of the toggle's option would be misleading, hence better 
> would be: "Mark messages read when replying, forwarding or archiving".

Yeah, I take you point here, cheers.

> As you leave out "deleting" from the description of the toggle, I am 
> inferring that deleting a conversation would not mark the messages of 
> the conversation as read.  I would be ok with that, but I would also 
> be ok with an implementation where deleting marks them as read.  In 
> the latter case, the description of the toggle should be: "Mark 
> messages read when replying, forwarding, archiving or deleting."

I was initially hesitant about applying it to trashed messages (I use 
"trashed" instead of "deleted" since these are two different 
operations, and since the latter permanently deletes a message it 
doesn't matter what its unread state is), because it kind of doesn't 
matter - Geary doesn't report unread counts for the Trash for the same 
reason. But on reflection if this pref applies to archiving messages, 
it should probably also apply to trashed messages and also to Spam/Junk 
messages, because Archived, Trashed, and Junk are all in some sense 
terminal states in a message's life-cycle.

I'm not sure what the pref for that would sound like though, something 
like "Mark messages read when replying, forwarding, archiving, trashing 
or junking" is way too verbose. It could instead read "Mark messages 
read when replying, archiving, or taking other actions", with the 
tooltip and and user manual fully explaining what those other actions 
are.

//Mike

--
⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>