[MlMt] Customising Mailbox Headers

[Malcolm Fitzgerald]

I've been customising my mailboxes recently. Different mailboxes have different needs. For example, an invoice from my utility company always has an attachment. That forms part of the rule set that defines the smart mailbox for bills. And because that's a rule, I don't need that information in the headers. It's a given, I don't need a visual indication.

The default set of headers includes quite a lot of information. For unread messages that aren't filtered into specific mailboxes that amount of information is useful. For most of the smart mailboxes I only want to see title and date.

The tools for modifying the header columns are fine - provided you only want to make one change. Unfortunately it is tedious to make many changes. It is especially tedious to have to make many changes to many mailboxes.

To switch multiple headers it's necessary to option-click the header to call up the dialog for every single change. I would much prefer if we could open the header column dialog and make multiple changes. When we are ready to commit the changes, we can use an OK button, or we can Cancel the dialog and no changes occur.

While I have been in the process of doing this I have discovered a nasty side effect. In the current setup, when there is only one column header selected ( subject, which is not user controlled ), the header disappears without warning. No header is displayed above the mailbox list view. In this situation, if that was not wanted, we can not rectify the situation. Because no header is displayed, (and there don't seem to be any menu items that allow me to manage that either,) then we cannot add the columns we would like to have displayed in the mailbox.

It was only by entering into a sustained click-frenzy, that I touched the conversation threading icons. Doing that, with no header displayed, caused the default collection of columns to be displayed and the header returned too. I'm guessing that is coded deliberately but I was surprised. If it's not deliberate, then we can add it to the list of known outcomes that may need to be evaluated.

Despite these trivial upsets I am very pleased to have such a good tool for managing email.

thank you,

Malcolm