Show number of current messages along with new

[jidanni]

Here we see to the left of each number of new messages there is a blank area, which could be used to also show the number of current (not new) messages!

Sure, you might say, well what if some folder doesn't have any messages at all?

Then have a 0 there in that currently empty column.

Okay, take the Boring folder shown here. Let's say there are a total of seven messages, six of them new. Okay then show a 7 to the left of the blue 6.

[alecpl]

Is there any mail client that does this? What if the number is very big? It could take too much space. Maybe "6 of 35k" in blue if there's 6 unread, and "35k" grey if there's no unread messages.

I'm not a fan of this idea. I'll leave the ticket open for some time.

Related to #8206.

[jidanni]

All I know is I grew up using gnus in emacs, and such full information is only natural. Just like knowing how many kids you have even if some of them are off at college. Or how much money you have in the bank even if part of it hasn't cleared yet.

Here's a feature that could distinguish you from the rest of the "competition." Naturally it could be a end user configuration option, off by default perhaps.

And if there's not enough room for the numbers, well that's because the numbers and their circles are rather ... space-ravenous.

Yes, with K for 1000 it will never get too long.

[adrienbeau]

I found this issue as I was looking for quite precisely this feature. As pointed out, it may be a challenge to display all that info in a legible way... Certainly a different look would be needed.

My use case is chiefly for my virtual folders, such as "recent mails", "flagged mails" or "unsorted mails". I am much more interested in how many mails I have in there than the number of unread mail they contain. For regular folders, I am indeed more used to how many unread I have, but wouldn't mind a view where I can keep an eye on totals.

Ideally, this would be a folder setting, with a choice of unread (the default), number of emails, and both (if doable in a legible way).

[jidanni]

Let's face it. It's totally brainnumbing, that one cannot tell which boxes have even a single male in them versus totally empty boxes.

(I don't mean to be harsh today, but I just had an argument with my phone's voice input.)

It's like we look down our block, and we can tell if somebody's home if they moved in recently. But if they've been living there for a while then you can't tell the difference between an empty house and...

Okay. Let's say there's three kinds of mailboxes. One with new things in them. One with old things in them. And one with nothing in them.

So I don't see what the logic is in giving super details about type number one and no details about type number two or three: where you can't even distinguish between them.

And, you can see there's still plenty of room for even nine thousand mails, (4 digits) not to push the digits around the screen.

And you ask what other mail reader gives you such information. Well I've just been using Gnus on Emacs...

And okay once we open the mailbox we can see both types of read and unread mails so there's no reason for prejudice in their indexes.

And the index has a nice blue background to indicate if there's something new and I'm sure you can figure out a way, mainly two columns, to show how many new and how many total or whatever and one of them should be with a blue background indicating they're new or something like that... can't be that hard. Or just do like Gnus does. In fact Gnus is infinitely configurable. So I would likewise make this an option that uses can turn off if for some reason they like the old fashioned less informative current method. Thanks.

Wait. Let's talk about the Drafts folder. Surely there's no defense for "pretending that there's nothing in there"!

---

Today let's have a look at the old messages folder.

We can't tell if there's anything in there.

So we pick it. Turns out, sure enough, there's nothing in there.

Well how could we have told ourselves that before we pushed the button?

Long tapping on the item in the index doesn't tell you.

So the only way to find out is to go check them one by one!