«Unread» meta-conversation/folder

Feature Proposal
#1

I’m not sure how to properly call the «chats» — because two of them («Saved messages» and «Device messages») aren’t really chats. In any case, the request is simple: to create another of those which groups unread chats.

The more general concept is «folders» like Telegram uses, where you can group conversations and groups under a certain name, to find them easily, and there are some filters to automatically apply them to certain statuses (such as «unread»). It’s basically a tagging system, well executed.

#2

I’m not sure how to properly call the «chats» — because two of them («Saved messages» and «Device messages») aren’t really chats.

At least from the point of view of Delta Chat core, Saved Messages, Device Messages and Contact Requests are chats.

Chats contain messages. Do you propose to add another concept (“Folders”) to contain chats? Or simply a virtual chat which contains all unread messages?

#3

Just in these days I had thought about a similar proposal, but to realize what I had imagined before it would serve to implement some things.

I try to explain what I imagined:
currently delta chat manages a single “active/selected” account at a time, if I have account1 (selected) and account2 (not selected) I receive notifications of messages only for account1 and to see if I have received messages on account2 I have to change account. Currently this is, in my opinion, one of the biggest limitation of delta chat but when and if it will be overcome we could think about a home page with different tabs:

  1. A tab containing all the chats of all the accounts that have unread messages
  2. One or more tabs with the chats of every single account

Something like this:
| unread chats | account1 chats | account2 chats |

Swiping left and right you should be able to quickly change tabs and accounts.

And maybe in the header of each tab you could add an indication of the number of unread messages.

I don’t know how feasible such a thing is but I think it could greatly improve the usability of the application.

I hope to have been understandable considering that English is not my native language.

#4

This is not the way simultaneous multi-account support is currently designed in the core. There is still a separate database for each account, so there is no way to do a single query for all unread chats from both databases and get results sorted by the date of the last unread message. SQLite supports cross-database queries, but it is not feasible to use it for dynamically changed number of databases, and you can have more than two accounts at the same time.

All notifications will still go to your OS notification manager, so you will not need to change accounts manually, just click through all notifications.

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#5

Thanks for the explanation on how simultaneous multi-account support will work.

I’m fine with the fact that you can’t implement an unread chats tab, but I still think it would be useful to find a way like the one I described to quickly switch accounts and see how many unread messages there are in each account.

I currently use delta chat with my main email address for chats with friends and family and an alias for groups. In the future I think I will use a second alias for newsletters and in this case it would be useful to be able to dismiss the notification without necessarily reading the message immediately. I think it would be useful to have a way to see if you have unread messages in an account with the ability to switch account immediately even after deleting the notification.

That’s just an idea and I would like to thank you all for the great work that you’re doing. I am already very satisfied with the application and very confident in future developments.

#6

It should be possible to indicate the number of unread messages for the whole account in the UI. For example, on Desktop account switching could be implemented with a sidebar similar to the one used to switch between Slack workspaces. Then each avatar could have a badge showing the number of unread messages.

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