[Imap-protocol] Childless noselect mailboxes

[Timo Sirainen]

On Tue, 2009-12-29 at 16:17 -0600, Brian Hayden wrote:

> > Correction: crappy clients display \NoSelect mailboxes in a  

> > confusing way.

> 

> Has anyone studied this from a user perspective? I suspect that you'd  

> have to come up with an interaction method that is both new and  

> intuitive (something that is quite the rare gem) to have the concept  

> have any meaning to the user in a client interface -- \NoSelect seems  

> quite foreign to everything else they encounter on a computer system  

> (or in any other interface, for that matter).


I've never studied, but my personal opinion:

The most annoying thing that a client can do is pop up a message saying
"Mailbox isn't selectable." This is what most clients seem to do.

What I think they should do is (lets assume a GUI client similar to
TB/Outlook/etc):

 - In the window where it would typically show list of messages or
message body, it would show a text something like "This mailbox doesn't
exist, it only contains children." (or something similar to that,
whatever is the most understandable text to user)

 - It could show also a button: "Create this mailbox."

 - It might also show "Child mailboxes:" and have a list of them. This
might be too much.

Hmm. Now that I think of it, I think clients usually show whatever the
NO reply to SELECT is from server. Maybe I could make that a bit more
informative.
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