Outbox shown too prominently

[jancborchardt]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The "Outbox" shown permanently is quite confusing and technical, especially also because it is not common from other mail apps.
I catch myself that when I send an email I always wait for the (1) counter on the Outbox to go away until I do anything else (like deleting the email I responded to). And that kind of defeats the purpose of the inline sending/undo.

Describe the solution you'd like

What was suggested by @small1 is to only use the Drafts and Sent folder for the flow and not have Outbox – and I agree with that.

It simplifies the mental model a lot as then a mail you are writing/sending can only be in 2 places (Drafts or Sent) instead of 3 (Outbox additionally).

If there’s a mail in scheduled to be sent or an issue with a mail supposed to be sent, the Drafts folder could have the counter.

@GretaD as discussed.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

Here is how Outlook and Gmail do it.
Gmail has a "Scheduled" entry but most of the time it’s empty anyway.

Outlook	Gmail

[ChristophWurst]

As a first step we will show/hide the outbox only when it has contents.

[jancborchardt]

@GretaD so @ChristophWurst and I talked about this a bit (sorry, you were fast on the pull request :D):

• It’s not such a good idea to hide and show the Outbox depending on contents, since then the folder list on the left will move around often (always when sending mail, showing for 7 seconds, then going away.
• We discussed an alternative of showing/hiding and leaving the vertical space empty when it’s hidden, but that just looks off. Even with space reduced it looks weird, and even worse when the Outbox actually shows

A possible approach would be to show the Outbox (while it has contents) sticky on the bottom. This has the challenge that we need to separate it a bit from the other list items if the list is long – this is what the divider line is for. The divider line only needs to show when the Outbox shows, not when only the Mail settings show.
Maybe there’s also a nicer way to do this with a fade to transparency of the scrollable content list? But not entirely sure how to do that in CSS. Maybe it’s also enough to just have the cutoff, just like we do on the top for the "New message" button.

With divider	Simply chopped like on top of nav	With fade to transparency

[GretaD]

@GretaD so @ChristophWurst and I talked about this a bit (sorry, you were fast on the pull request :D):

all good, i will try your suggestion tomorrow