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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: KMail and contacts - RMB behavior
From:       "Michael W. Collette" <metrol () metrol ! net>
Date:       2002-05-29 7:30:33
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On Tuesday 28 May 2002 04:42 pm, Eric Ellsworth wrote:
> Good point.  This does strike me as something that's well suited for
> prefetching, as a message just sits there a lot of the time...the exception
> I know being: sometimes when I want to add an address to the address book I
> rummage through
>
> I just like it because it's compact, and *bonus*  you know without clicking
> whether the contact is in your addressbook rather than getting "you can't
> do this" feedback.

Been running a little shy on time over here, but I hope to stay up to speed 
with this discussion as I believe it to be very important.

As to this preloading idea, I'm of the same opinion as Aaron.  This is an 
extremely bad road to even look at going down.  KMail's greatest strength is 
it's speed, and no feature or functionality should ever be put in front of 
that.  Having to pull every time from a possibly large address book or 
network connection would slow things down considerably for very little gain.

Now that I'm done beating up Eric here (sorry about that, but I feel pretty 
strongly about this) how about I at least provide something constructive to 
Eric's concerns.  Almost gun shy about mentioning it, but this is another one 
of them Mozilla features.  Here's what Moz does.

As E-Mail is looked at, Moz Mail collects all the addresses that appear in the 
headers of those messages in a seperate address book.  Oddly enough, it's 
called "Collected Addresses".  In the preferences you can specify the max 
number of addresses to collect.  The default is 700.

Since I would imagine Eric's real concern is making sure he doesn't lose 
important addresses, this would address that point.  A simple text list of 
addresses could be the holder for this information, appending on each mail 
that is read.  On a number of specified events, KMail could initiate a clean 
up on this list when a user would expect a small delay.  Like program shut 
down, compressing folders, or requesting to view the collected addresses.  
Some nice time to run something like a "sort | uniq" on the list.  Needs to 
be a teensy more complex, as you also need to track the date an address is 
added.

When a user spots one of these collected addresses that's a keeper, then it 
should get a proper entry into the address book.  The mechanics of the user 
interaction to do so is most likely a topic all its own.

Personally, I don't share Eric's concerns about whether or not an address has 
been stored, as I usually keep my book rather small and store my old messages 
in a tree of folders.  It is probably quite safe to say that other users 
would make good use of a "Collected Addresses" feature that Mozilla is now 
offering.

Is this something that KMail should also be doing?  If so, what kind of 
mechanics would it actually employ?

Later on,
-- 
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark 
to read."
 - Groucho Marx
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