Friday, April 09, 2004

View message from this contact... (or beer is good for you...)

After some beers, on the way home... I had a flash: I decided to use a relational database for MyOE, I thought it would let me add some "cool feature" that you generally won't find in other mail client... but in reality, what feature did I add?

- Category folder, a folder that shows all the mail of this category (and it's a problem, now I want multiple category... will have to think about it).
- Unread items folder, it will contains... guess what, unread mails!
- Spam message: spam aren't moved to the spam folder, they stay in their folder, the big advantage is that if a message was detected as spam but isn't, if you set it as "non spam", it will be sorted in the right folder, you won't have to move it out the spam folder.
- Big message folder: showing all the message with a big attachments, the idea is that it's an easy search criteria (I know Jhon sent me this mail with this document...).

Yesterday, I added another interresting idea: folder containing message from or sent to a given contact, you just have to drag/drop a contact in your folder list it will create a new folder dedicated to this contact, even more interresting, right click on a contact (in the contact list) and choose "View message from this contact...", the current message list will be filled with message from this contact...

In short: database are cool.

But all this stuff lead me to another reflection: what kind of search is interresting, I guess like me, and like lot of other people, you've came across a situation like this: "where is this f**** mail containing this f***** information that I need NOW?". The big question is what kind of search you need to find this f***** mail NOW?

Thursday, April 08, 2004

Better RSS feed support ...

... for this blog (see http://myoe.alrj.org/blog/atom.xml) and for MyOE.NET (thanks Weber Wang).

MyOE now support Atom feed, rss1.0 and 2.0 feed and display the news in a new list instead of HTML file...

Other important change in MyOE is archiving support, you can now decide how long message are kept and what to do with them after this time (remove, move to trash, archive, ...). I also removed some important bug in thread management: smoother UI, less deadlock, more confidence in my product ;)