Implementing a more detailed/powerful overview

When you open a folder or mailbox with the setting “Automatically select next message” unchecked, Geary currently shows an empty page. I can think of showing an overview of that mailbox or folder, which could implement a lot of enhancements and act as an entry point for further features. Here is a list of thoughts:

• Basically, this overview could show previews of the contained mails like the current mail list pane does, but either in a different style (e.g. formatted) for avoiding redundancy or showing a bigger preview (via fold-out?), as the small preview of the current mail list pane often is pretty marginal and sometimes not helpful.

  • The preview in the current mail list pane then could be disabled, so that the pane could show more mails.
  • Alternatively, the current mail list pane then could show images of all participants of a conversation instead of the preview.
  • Showing that current small preview in the mail list pane might still be needed for mobile phone usage.

• Productivity enhancements could be implemented in that overview page. Like filtering or sorting options of just the local, contained mails.

  • Mails could be grouped to specific topics here.
  • For example there could be a list of all participants who occur in all mails of a folder.
  • Tags of mails could be shown here, as these would clutter the current mail list pane.
  • Clicking on one (or more) of the persons or tags or topics could activate a filter for just showing all mails related to that person(s)/tag(s).
  • Local search could be implemented here, in addition to the filtering mentioned above (in contrast to the global search in the header bar).
  • Single mail annotations and maybe even short notes (tied to the folder/mailbox) could be implemented here.

So these are all just considerations, I don’t know if you have already thought of something like this? But I think this could be a good way for providing additional features to a specific subset of mails on demand, without clogging the general user interface.