I have 8 different email accounts defined in K-9 Mail. I use the Unified inbox.
It would really help if when I open a message sent to me in one of the accounts if it said the account name or email address in the header. Now it just says “me” which isn’t helpful at all.
Could an option be added to show the acctual account name or email address so that I don’t have to constantly click on the header to see what the account is? I know the accounts are color coded, but who can remember the colors of 8 different email accounts.
I know that, but just saying “me” in the To field is really not helpful. I have 8 accounts defined and all of them are not for me. I’ve never understood why the To field says me. It’s really not helpful if you have more than one account defined.
You are absolutely right. I monitor multiple accounts, sometimes those of other users, where the intended user is definitely not me. And webmaster is sometimes me but the mail was addressed to the administrator of the site which may not necessarily be me. The use of “me” does not make sense, preferable would be the email address.
I’m not clicking on an account, I’m clicking on a message. When I click on a message I am in the unified inbox and the account name doesn’t show so how am I to know the account name?
That isn’t true for me. If I open an email in any of the accounts it shows just “me” in the To field.
You assume too much, please read: And webmaster is sometimes me but the mail was addressed to the administrator of the site which may not necessarily be me. The use of “me” does not make sense, preferable would be the email address.
Just assume that you are a member of the management board of the Canine Nine Fan club (C9FC) which uses the email address info@c9fc.fan monitored by all the board members. Was the email send to you (“me”) or to the info at the fan club ? The C9FC uses a small server to maintain the mailing list, this server is backed up daily and the log is send by email to backup.admin@c9fc.fan. The responsibility for backup lies with the one of the members and is monitored by you in your capacity as assistant backup administrator (not “me”).
There are many good reasons why “me” is a bad idea.
Hmm? So you don’t have the account name above the message after you click a message in the unified inbox? What K-9 version are you running? I thought account name and “to me” got introduced in the same update. If you open the message from the unified inbox, it should look something like this: Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox: "Here's a screenshot of #K9Mail's current message …" - Mastodon If you open the message from the account, the account name is not displayed.
I assumed you were talking about alias addresses. So the only thing that you don’t like is the fact that it says “you” and not “your role in the company”?
If you see my first reply to cketti, I did say that I do have the “pill” with the account at the top, but in the To file it says just “me” no matter what account I’m in. It shows “me” when the account isn’t even mine. What’s the point? It is of no help at all. I am not saying to change the default as I know people may be used to seeing “me”. I am asking for an option to show the account name instead. Really, what good is having it say “me” for every account? It even shows “me” when the email has a Reply-to field that is the same as the “From” field (which isn’t even an account I have defined).
Somehow I still don’t get the problem. So you see the account name above the subject and this is all about wanting to see the account name below the sender instead? So all you are asking for is moving/copying the text to another location on the same screen?
You are not alone, this has been a problem for some time.
The problem is the intended meaning of “Me”, is it you the reader or is it you the recipient as laid down in the account details, or is it K-9 referring to itself as being me. The problem with “Me” is that normally it refers to a person (pronoun). When asking Google for “meaning of me” it brings up a few examples whereby none can be used to explain the use of “Me” by K-9.
What we want / need is that on the line normally occupied by “to me” is used to display the recipient email address.
Or are you trying to inform us that we have been doing it wrong all the time and should use the recipient email address as the account name ? That would be counter intuitive because in the “Account settings” dropdown list the account name shows the associated email address.
If find it very important to have the email reflect the correct details to avoid confusion, it is not just cosmetic, it is missing an important detail that informs the reader where he is and not where his brain thinks it should be as the account name must not be representative of the identity (email address).
To keep it simple: we need the email account instead of “me”.
Another issue brought to my attention that there is another problem with the message display. On the first header line it displays the sender with an abbreviated date/time the message was send. This does not make sense as any message from today shows a time, the previous week the day name and before that the date only. This is where I would expect the day/date and time to be displayed, one possible reason being so that I can take a screen shot and make an entry in Samsung Notes. The correct date/time would not put my brain high gear trying to identify who was send the message at what time point.
An important addition might be that I need glasses to read the screen and sometimes with bad light conditions and small text my eyes spends most of the time on the payload and not the envelope, for this reason the envelope should be easy to identify and understand.
That is an argument against showing “to me”. So the problem you have with “to me” would be solved by not showing anything there. What I am looking for is a convincing argument why the email address should be there, not why “to me” should not be there.
Personally, I find the word “Work” as account name easier to read than the full email address, but if it is easier for you reading the email address, sure, why not?
Go back and read that what I have written. I did write why the email address and proper date is needed. I have 40+ years technical support experience to backup my findings. FYI that Google (and maybe Microsoft) does something similar does not imply that they are doing the right thing. K-9 can do better.
If you are trying to have K-9 become Thunderbird for Android, why would you not want to have the email address show there. It shows there in Thunderbird. I guess I really don’t understand why an option can’t allow this just for consistency. If that is not possible, then removing the to line entirely and having just the “pill” is fine. This however makes K-9 look even less like Thunderbird.
Some of the accounts that I use in K-9 have varying counts of many hundreds of aliases that could be the original recipient address in addition to the primary email address assigned to each account. Knowing the original recipient address the message was sent to is significant for anyone who has many aliases on the same mailbox.
I understand that your use case doesn’t benefit from such information, but the scenario where it is important is quite real.
To get a better idea of what one might see, I sampled such an email from my inbox. I wanted to identify whether my common workaround of Show headers was how I handled this situation. You can imagine my surprise when I saw specific_alias@example.com displayed in the message header bar. Perhaps the display of me in lieu of the actual recipient address varies depending on whether an identity using the address has been configured in K-9.
I recall a slightly confusing change in the way recipients were presented at some point during my long history of using K-9 Mail. I updated the names on my accounts and identities at that time to make recognition more intuitive. It may well have been annoyance at the use of “me” that drove that change on my part.
Hopefully anyone who would benefit from seeing more informative recipient data will be able to figure out a way to meet that need.
Thunderbird desktop is used on a huge screen, thunderbird mobile isn’t. That’s why thunderbird mobile can’t show all the same things that the desktop version does.
I have hundreds (well, basically unlimited) aliases as well. “To me” is only shown for the primary email address, for the aliases I get the email address. Is that different on your device?
Same with me but I have a number of accounts with different email addresses and each one becomes “to me”. I understand that you have experience with aliases but do you understand that using an alias not the norm, most users may not even know what an alias means. Should I create an alias for myself on my fathers(*) email account so that I can monitor his doings, or should I use the primary email address ? In both cases there is only one password so the only purpose of using an alias would be to bypass a shortfall in K-9 mail.
(*) My father is 93 and does have K-9 mail installed on his tablet but he prefers Outlook on his PC. I fully agree because it will be difficult for me to explain that the one “to me” is not the same as the other “to me”. I have tried to convince his to use K-9 mail to able to see if any emails have come in but he says his thumbs are to big for the screen.
That may well be, but there would be plenty of room on the To line for the actual email address rather than “me”.
This is obviously getting us nowhere. I thought an option would be easy and helpful as the “me” designation is completely useless and in some cases wrong. Maybe K-9 isn’t for me.
I am not surprised, the people involved are very “beratungsresistent” and my experience is that each thread of mine that brings up improvements to the app will be drowned.
I know. I’ve never seen a programmer so reluctant to change based on feedback from customers. I was a programmer for over 30 years and trying to please customers was always the top of the list. Obviously that isn’t the case at K-9.
