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Smart Mailbox Doesn't Refresh Itself

#1087

This is a non-critical minor annoyance. I've created my own custom smart box called "Incoming!": the "Mailboxes" setting is All Messages, and there are conditions to include a few specific source-paths of the pattern "Inbox/sub-mailbox" and exclude all Trash and Junk.

On the sources side, messages come into the "Inbox/sub-mailbox" via filter-rules in their parent Inboxes. The sub-mailboxes then further filter those incoming messages, sending some to Trash, some to other mailboxes.

In the smart box called "Incoming!", those filtered messages appear when they enter the "Inbox/sub-mailbox," but don't disappear (from "Incoming!") when filtered out of the "Inbox/sub-mailbox"; i.e. the "Incoming!" smart box doesn't refresh itself, and those filtered out messages are dead, so to speak: I can't delete them from the "Incoming!" smart box, because they're no longer in a source mailbox that "Incoming!" is connected to.

What I'm doing now is clicking on any other smart mailbox and them clicking back on "Incoming!", and that refreshes it. If in some future release it could refresh itself, that would make MailMate just that tiny bit more elegant.

Reported by Mark · March 26th, 2015 @ 11:13 PM

State: new
Milestone: none
Assigned to: benny benny

Activity

  1. benny
    benny
    • State changed from new to accepted

    The explanation (I think): MailMate intentionally do not remove emails from the current view when, e.g., marking something “read” in the Unread mailbox. This is because it would quickly become confusing if an email disappeared just because the user was reading it. Unfortunately, this has some bad side-effects and I haven't yet found a good solution. But I'm thinking about it because I'm also bitten by it myself.

    March 27th, 2015 @ 09:51 AM

  2. Jochen Issing
    Jochen Issing

    Mail.app has a menu item called "Rebuild", which refreshes the current mailbox.
    Thereby the user could refresh the mailbox on demand and the UI would not get messed up automatically.

    November 25th, 2015 @ 03:57 PM

  3. Dave Eckhardt
    Dave Eckhardt

    One option might be to somehow indicate visually that the message
    "isn't really there" (e.g., grey it out). Then clean up the greyed-out messages when the view updates in some other way (such
    as something being added), or after a 5-minute delay.

    December 4th, 2015 @ 03:11 AM

  4. benny
    benny

    @Jochen: Yes, some kind of explicit refresh method would be useful.

    @Dave: Yes, some visual indication of the message state would be useful, but I don't think I should try to be “too smart” about auto-refreshing (at least not by default).

    Thanks for your comments.

    December 4th, 2015 @ 08:49 AM

  5. Jochen Issing
    Jochen Issing

    Thanks benny for both responding and MailMate! :)
    Out of curiosity: Does accepted mean it's in the backlog and is there any way to see the backlog's progress?

    December 4th, 2015 @ 09:15 AM

  6. benny
    benny

    @Jochen: It just means that it's something I'm willing to implement, but as can be seen in the ticket system that does not mean it's going to happen any time soon. It could be days or it could be years. If/when I do implement it then the ticket is updated with “fixcommitted/fixreleased”.

    December 4th, 2015 @ 09:18 AM

  7. fnurl
    fnurl
    • Tag set to smartfolder, smartmailbox

    Yes, a "refresh" option for Smart Mailboxes would be nice. I agree that an auto-refresh is not optimal. However, a notification just below the column headers saying something like "New messages are available for this view. Refresh?" together with "Yes" and "Not this time" buttons would be a good way of handling this I think.

    (basically what Gmail does for conversations -- "A new reply from X is available, update conversation?")

    February 13th, 2016 @ 11:26 AM

  8. benny
    benny

    @fnurl: New things should always appear immediately. This ticket is about MailMate not removing messages from the currently displayed mailbox if it was triggered by a keyword change. This is intentional, but the current implementation is a bit too general and some times emails stick to a mailbox when it doesn't make a lot of sense.

    February 16th, 2016 @ 10:47 AM

  9. Januz
    Januz

    Has a command to refresh a smart mailbox ever been added? I would also like to manually (with a keyboard shortcut) refresh the current smart mailbox. Thanks!

    February 10th, 2019 @ 01:30 AM

  10. benny
    benny
    • State changed from accepted to fixcommitted

    The default behavior should be better now, but there actually is a keybinding selector for explicitly refreshing (no menu item):

    refreshMailbox:

    With respect to the original problem in this ticket, I believe MailMate has better default behavior now.

    February 11th, 2019 @ 02:34 PM

  11. benny
    benny
    • State changed from fixcommitted to fixreleased

    May 27th, 2019 @ 01:05 PM

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