Sent folder

[JeremyNicoll]

Originally Posted by Terry

I was referring to the OP & BritTim I am not sure what he is missing.

He wants another (or a different) column of values in the list of messages within the folder, so he doesn't have to open each one to find the info.

A long time ago I used an email client which allowed one to configure one's choice of columns, their position & widths. One optional column, apart from the more usual "To" & "From" columns, was "Other person" which for something I sent showed the recipient & for something I received showed the sender & therefore combined most of the need for To/From in one column not two.

[Terry]

Oh OK thank you.
Sounds complicated and I would never use it.

[BritTim]

I would love to have an option that allowed you to specify whether a folder should be treated as mainly containing sent messages or received messages, and would adapt the headers in the message list accordingly.

EDIT: Does anyone have ideas as to the ideal behaviour in searches? Should there, in both regular message lists and lists of messages from searches, be a button to toggle between suitable headers for received messages and for sent messages?

[pjroutledge]

I use labels rather than folders.

I just created a sub-label of the 'Sent' label, and labelled some sent and some received emails with it. The recipients are listed (a la the parent Sent label) rather than the senders, which sounds like what the OP wanted.
BUT, this listing of recipients rather than senders only seems to work when the label is under 'Sent' as the parent. Putting it anywhere else results in the usual Sender column being displayed.

I'm assuming the same behaviour would be observed with folders. I'm also assuming the Fastmail web interface.

It works, but only if you make all your various Sent folders/labels children of the official 'Sent' folder.

[JeremyNicoll]

Originally Posted by Terry

Oh OK thank you.
Sounds complicated and I would never use it.

It's not complicated. In any ongoing email discussion between you & someone else, the person at the other end of the discussion is constant in all the emails. Why should you not be able to find all those related mails, without having to do a search for "to equals them OR from equals them"?

It meant that if you sorted a folder by that column all the parts of a series of messages to/from one of your correspondents would be listed next to each other.

If you sub-sorted by subject & perhaps date (since the client I used then * did allow multiple levels of sort) you'd have all the same-subject ones together and in the order they occurred in.


If you were, in the days of letters on paper, keeping all your letters to a particular friend together, would you not interleave them so you could see those sent to you in the midst of - if not copies of those you sent, if you had no way to make copies - but at least notes on what you mentioned in your letters to them? Surely you'd not keep one heap of letters you received & a separate heap of copies/notes of those you sent?


* Why don't I use that client now? It only runs on an obscure OS, so to use it under Windows or Unix/Linux I'd need to run an emulator, & the time to start that up & get the client going is a nuisance.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by JeremyNicoll

... Why should you not be able to find all those related mails, without having to do a search for "to equals them OR from equals them"?

In Fastmail you can search for "with:them".

Surely you'd not keep one heap of letters you received & a separate heap of copies/notes of those you sent?

This is what people would do if they were being told to sort their email and there was no existing paradigm forced on them by programmers. Conversation view provides a sort of compromise that shows messages going both ways together.



I don't use conversation view. Almost always after I read (and perhaps reply to) a message in Fastmail I click in the search box and select the search with the current sender, and then I can file the message together with any reply, or past related messages with the same correspondent, together in an appropriate folder (that would still show only the sender's identity even if it is myself).

[JeremyNicoll]

Originally Posted by hadaso

In Fastmail you can search for "with:them".

This is what people would do if they were being told to sort their email and there was no existing paradigm forced on them by programmers. Conversation view provides a sort of compromise that shows messages going both ways together.

It's been a while since I had that turned on; just tried it ... don't like it. It seems to me to be a poor substitute for a proper threaded (tree/sub-tree) view which I usually used on email clients.

Originally Posted by hadaso

I don't use conversation view. Almost always after I read (and perhaps reply to) a message in Fastmail I click in the search box and select the search with the current sender, and then I can file the message together with any reply, or past related messages with the same correspondent, together in an appropriate folder (that would still show only the sender's identity even if it is myself).

I have hundreds of folders (& matching filters) so pretty much any discussion with a specific company or specific friend is already in a correspondent-specific folder.

About the only time I use search is when it's been a while since I last looked at mails in specific (mostly computing) mail-list folders when it's useful to isolate just posts on a particular topic before skim-reading some or all of them & deciding whether or not to keep them.

[NumberSix]

Originally Posted by pjroutledge

It works, but only if you make all your various Sent folders/labels children of the official 'Sent' folder.

Thanks for figuring this out and letting us know. I don't need it myself, and I have a feeling that many people like OP who want this behavior will still be unhappy because they probably prefer to have all the sent and recv'd for any given slice of their email world to be bundled together under one parent, but at least it's good to know that there is a solution, which means almost certainly FM will never bother to implement anything else. Apropos of which my next post...

[NumberSix]

Originally Posted by BritTim

This has been an issue for 20 years, and Fastmail is aware of it. They have decided not to address it.

I have on several occasions been maddened by FM's flat refusal to implement something simple but which seems to me an absolute no-brainer. Even when, as a software dev myself, I know that the change would likely take less than an hour of developer time to put in production (which makes it more of slap in the face, I feel )

I shall now unburden myself about two such:

I really could not understand or accept it when they changed the 2FA part of login so that you had to always choose which 2FA method you wanted to use.... for THAT login. Every time. I almost always, 98% of the time, use the same browser and same method. Why can't the browser or server remember which is my preferred method and prompt me immediately for it after my p/w is accepted? I would of course have the option to change if I need to. But now, I need to make an extra click for "use my security key" every single time I login, which is pretty often! (I don't allow login sessions to sit idle longer than 2 hrs for security reasons). Why would FM inflict this extra step on me when good UX design, as far as I can see, was the way they used to do it? (i.e. remember the last method used and assume that the user will want the same thing again). And though I reported this grievance to them, perhaps more than once, they have been extremely stubborn about not seeing the light of day Neither did they respond to me with an explanation of why the new way is better.

OK, that was a long rant... the second one I'll actually make a new top post about, because I'd like to know what others think about it.

[Terry]

I dont have 2FA using win 11 and firefox

[NumberSix]

Originally Posted by Terry

I dont have 2FA using win 11 and firefox

Do all (or any) of your financial accounts have web passwords that can be reset over email? If so, you really need to start using 2FA. If you use social media, I strongly recommend it for that, too. For anything important where you would be highly distressed if the account were hacked. It really is an absolute necessity in today's world, most of all for email and financials.

I mostly use Yubikeys, and recommend them, but authenticator app for the phone is also good (I use Duo, but I think they're all roughly the same), and even SMS. Anything is better than nothing. I don't think you're going to actually take my advice, but it needed to be said