Totally Lacking in Functionality!

[tonysu]

Need to have the following addressed before the Mobile Web Client can be considered for serious use...

- Need to display all User folders. Currently only the contents of the Inbox is displayed, there doesn't appear to be any way of visualizing, navigating or selecting another User defined folder. Usual approaches are controls (or can often be implemented using javascript) treeviews or buttons that are dynamically generated by inspecting the folders in the mailbox.

- There doesn't seem to be any way of selecting multiple items for bulk operations (move, delete, send to junkmail, forward, etc). This is a special problem specific of smaller mobile devices which unlike larger devices only supports single clicks. It's either difficult or impossible to implement standard keyboard operations like CTL-CLK, SHFT-CLK, SHFT-DEL, etc. which means that you have to build your UI appropriately... So for instance a common thing to do in webmail is to place a checkbox next to the headers to enable selection or deselection.

BTW - Congrats to the Team for the performance improvements on Scalix 11.4.3 compared to all previous versions. I'd gotten used to working around the old latencies, the web UI now performs maybe even faster than an IMAP heavy client which is really saying something!

Tony

[tonysu]

Submitted as bug, bug 20504

[tonysu]

Florian,
Thx for the comment you posted in the Bug Tracker,

It's useful to know that it's still possible to use Search to return results in items that have been already re-routed from the Inbox to custom folders although it can still be a trick to return messages... For one thing, if you can't see whether any messages have been re-routed that means that it's still not easy to know whether something <important> has arrived (when messages are re-routed then that means usually the least important messages are still left in the Inbox).

Although I'm not a big fan of Google's Gmail, I wonder if these Scalix issues might find a resolution by inspecting how Gmail works...

Gmail has eliminated the use of Custom folders, instead implementing Tags. Every message, whether outbound or inbound is stored in the same message store but is Tagged. Tags can either be default (like Inbox, Outbox and Trash) or can be Custom created by the user. At least today, only the default tags are supported when displaying messages using the Folder metaphor, if the User wants to display any custom groupings of messages, then a custom Tag (in a way consistent with and replacing the Custom Folder) has to be assigned to the message(s) and then a Search will return only those tagged messages.

What I find interesting about Gmail is that although this method for orgainizing messages is very unconventional and non-traditional there seems to be a large number of people using Gmail without complaint... I don't know if it's because they're not power users or Gmail is their first mail provider so don't know any better. Regardless, in Gmail there seems to be an underlying architecture which may or may not be relevant to Scalix that supports both a traditional tree of Custom Folders or a simpler tag-based User Interface that sounds very similar to the comment you made in the Bug Tracker.

Tony