[MlMt] SideBar organisational tabs/menus

[Bill Cole]

On 25 Feb 2016, at 11:18, John Cooper wrote:

> Marc ARC wrote (at 7:01 on 25 Feb 2016):
>
>> For me it would be handy to have an additional MyMailboxes menu/tab 
>> in the sidebar where I can put the SmartMailboxes I use.
>> Could this also benefit other users ?
>> Or is there an other elegant way to have similar presentation.
>
> I'll add my comments. I would appreciate an interface where I can keep 
> MAILBOXES and SOURCES collapsed, and expand only a third section that 
> contains only my smart mailboxes. (Preferably, this section would be 
> at the top.) After two years of using MailMate, I still find it 
> distracting and even a little confusing to have unread-mail counters 
> in two different places that indicate the same unread mail.

It is possible to come close to this by deleting any smart mailboxes 
that you never want and moving all of the ones you rarely want into a 
subfolder (like the "Examples" folder in the  standard MM collection.) 
You can even move  all of the unified "special" mailboxes into one 
subfolder, but that only holds until MM is quit. At re-launch, they'll 
pop back out to the top level. However, you CAN (at  least in  the  
latest  betas)  re-order  them. So you can get something like this: 
http://www.scconsult.com/MMClean.png

(The "Clutter" subfolder has a dozen or so ad 
hoc/rarely-used/intermediate smart mailboxes. The 11 hidden sources have 
586 sub-folders with messages in them, up to 5 layers deep. Which  
actually makes sense. Really.)

> I find it unfortunate that I can't keep Sources collapsed. Even if I 
> do, it opens up again when I select a message from the menu bar 
> counter.

Why not just change what the menubar counters point to?

Preferences->Counters is probably the worst-understood part of the MM 
UI, and it deserves that. However, once you figure out how it works, 
it's brilliantly useful.

The 4 left-side radio buttons select which of 4 counters the right-side 
controls refer to. The radio buttons are presumably in an unlabeled 
square because that indicates which corner  of the Dock icon each one 
occupies. If you don't use Dock icon badges this is entirely 
unintuitive. In the "Mailbox" pull-down menu, you can select any 
mailbox. If it's a smart mailbox, selecting a message from the menubar 
icon opens that smart mailbox, NOT the source the message resides in.

> MailMate's excellent smart mailboxes system means that I should have 
> to see the source mailboxes (and their duplicate unread counts) only 
> very rarely.

And you shall not, if you adjust the configuration to your preferences.

> The same goes for the standard mailboxes in the MAILBOXES section.

I absolutely concur. If I could totally kill off "Archives" (which is 
useless as implemented, given how I actually archive email) I would. I'd 
also stash MOST of the unified special mailboxes in a subfolder, since 
even when I need to see one of them, there's rarely a reason for it to 
be unified across all source accounts.