Errk. Can the people who don’t have a lot of PMs have a way to continue use the old interface? The new one is really confounding.

There are typically about 10 messages in mine, so I don’t need search or any fancy folder stuff. But I delete messages often, and doing so now involves a combobox. I think it’s enough to select “Move [selected] messages to [(deleted)]” and then tick off messages? Not obvious, though.

Shouldn’t “General” be called “Inbox”?

Choosing folders by twiddling the search stuff is confusing. When I moved a few messages into the Archives folder, I was momentarily puzzled at where they went and how I could get them back.

Sorry; the features are nice, I suppose (I’d need a while to figure out all the things I can do now), but that interface is just horrible.

Makeshifts last the longest.

Every twenty four hours the trash bags are dumped. Then anything in the deleted folder is moved into the trash bag. This way you have at minimum twenty four hours to undelete, and at maximum 48. I could have called them "soon to be dumped" and "recently deleted" or something like that, or even not shown any difference to the user, but I didnt.

The other two issues ill look into, but you could just as easily post a patch. :-)

BTW, search criteria apply to moves/deletes. So if you have a private chat with someone you can just filter on their name and then choose "unselected" and "(deleted)" and hit submit and all the ones you can see will be deleted. This is also useful for removing replies from root in bulk or whatever.

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$world=~s/war/peace/g

Ok, I propose the following.

First, who is going to submit a search at the same time as they’re moving some individual items to arbitrary folders and a group of others to yet another place? Allowing that sort of multiple action just forces the user to consider every single control on the page (all belonging to several distinct actions) for every single action he takes. Awful. The whole thing needs to be broken out into several independent forms.

1. Folders need to be listed as clickable links on the left-hand side, with the count of messages in the respective folder included on the label. The currently selected folder should be highlighted and not linked.

2. The search stuff needs to be a completely separate from. Preferrably should go at the bottom, I think. Default the folder to “(all)”, since that’s what most people are probably likely to want when they do a search. Instead of the [From | To | From/To] dropdown, put two checkboxes. Comboboxes are the least usable UI control by far; avoid whenever possible.

   Update: search in deleted messages only when the user explicitly asks for that.

3. When showing search results from all folders, no folder should be selected; or maybe show a virtual “Search Results” folder. In that view, put the search controls at the top so they’re easier to reach when the user inevitably goes to refine his/her search.

4. Untangle the message input box from the target selection. The current setup is

   Send to:
     * User: [_____]
   Nobody  Reply text:
     *  [________________]
   Reply to:
     * Foo says Blah
     * Bar says Blah
   

   Instead it should be

   Message: [________________]
   
   Send to:
     * Nobody
     * User: [_____]
   Reply to:
     * Foo says Blah
     * Bar says Blah
   

   A nice touch for those with JS enabled would be to auto-select the “User” checkbox when the attached entry gets changed to something non-empty. Actually now that I look at the new arrangement I wonder why there needs to be a “Nobody” option at all; sending to a blank username would accomplish the same.

5. Move/delete:

   • Put the controls on the right side in the replies table, lined up with the checkboxes.

   • Lose the Folder dropdown box for individual messages, since it adds a huge amount of visual clutter and only benefits the people who have a significant number of folders and frequently file many different messages into many different of these folders at once. I can’t imagine that being such a large fraction of the userbase that it’s worth degrading the page’s skimmability for everyone else.

     Update: the only other case where these dropdowns matter is when doing a search that picks up results from multiple folders. So group search results by folder.

   • To preserve the “apply actions to the results of a search” functionality, you can add the search parameters as hidden fields to the reply form.

6. Update: lose the “(deleted)” vs. “(trash-bag)” distinction. Just show how much time messages have left till irreversible deletion.

Makeshifts last the longest.

Ive done some tweaking of the UI for the inbox. I hope that some of your concerns are resolved now. Please post any patches to demerphq's sandpit, not to the inbox, as the sandpit is where they will get tested before they go to the inbox.

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$world=~s/war/peace/g

That looks much nicer, though it’s not quite there yet IMHO.

Concerning patches: I thought I’d poke and prod it on the dev server and post patches to the regular inbox once I’m done. Not good?

Makeshifts last the longest.

Echoing Aristotle's concerns, perhaps we should revisit the idea of a list of check boxes rather than the drop list for selecting the currently viewed "folders".

An objection to using check boxes was raised related to the editable nature of the folders and there was a nice compromise suggested, but I forget what it was. Did you archieve any of that discussion in some fashion?