[Design] Recognizing a response, and group filters

[Andy Dent]

At 15:42 -0800 25/02/2003, Kaitlin Duck Sherwood wrote:
>I'm scratching my head a little bit as to how I'd implement a passive
>notification of "new message returned by this query since last time this
>stored query was run", and think it might need to be an agent's
>responsibility.  I'll keep thinking about it.

This is stuff that Tinderbox does so may be worth a look for some
inspiration :-)

http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

--- related ideas ---

"Degrees of Done"
I have a working pattern which sometimes gets me in trouble.

I read things and sometimes need to think about them for a half day or more
before replying.

With one client, I typically receive about 6 messages a day when he's in
brainstorming mode.

Moving them to a different mailbox takes them out of historical context and
makes them harder to keep track of.

I'd love a way to be able to flag messages as "read but not done".

One way to be able to cope with this would be to be able to keep draft
replies attached to a message:
- there must be some barrier to sending drafts accidentally (particularly
the ones where you need to cool down for 24 hours)
- drafts can't live in your outbox, as they do with Eudora, because it is
too easy to delete them  by accident
- an indicator is needed and quick link to the drafted replies
- it's not a singular activity - one message may spark several threads.

Threaded email would work well if drafts could be easily identified.
Eudora's status column with simple indicators for Sendable vs Queued vs
Sent works well because you can click on the column header and sort by
status.

However, whilst I'm in dreamland, I'd also like for a given message to be
able to see it in context.

Maybe one method that would work is to be able to "show parents" in a
threaded view so you can see the drafted messages (or any other results of
a filter) and JUST the immediate parentage in the thread, hiding siblings
where possible.

This is a lot like the OO browser ability to simplify a tree to just show
the parents of a selected class.
-- 
Andy Dent BSc  MACS  AACM   http://www.oofile.com.au/
OOFILE - Database, Reports, Graphs, GUI for c++ on Mac, Unix & Windows
PP2MFC - PowerPlant->MFC portability