K-9: Configurable notification actions

[cketti]

To avoid supporting a lot of different very specific notification action configurations I propose we allow users to fully customize which actions are displayed on a notification.

For the user interface I have have the following in mind: a list with three sections. The first one takes 3 items max and is for notification actions displayed on the device. The second section takes 5 items max and is for additional actions that can only be displayed on Android Wear devices (where I believe the maximum number of notification actions is 8). The third section is for actions K-9 Mail also supports but that are not currently used. Items in the list can be moved via drag and drop to change the order in a section or to move an action from one section to another.

On device with Android versions prior to 7.0 we use two kinds of notifications:

1. a notification for a single new message where a preview of the body text is displayed
2. a notification for multiple new messages where name and subject of the 5 most recent messages are displayed
   Android 7.0 introduced support for notification groups where multiple single message notifications can be bundled and the group can be expanded/collapsed by the user.

Some notification actions like "reply" don't make sense when applied to a group of messages. Often the order of desired actions is also different between the two types of notifications. So on devices with Android versions prior to 7.0 I propose we have two different configuration settings for notification actions. One for group notifications and one for single message notifications.

[nomeata]

Would it make the configuration interface easier there is a single list that you can reorder? “Notification action preference”? The user will quickly and intuitively notice that the top actions show up in the notification.

[cketti]

Would it make the configuration interface easier there is a single list that you can reorder? “Notification action preference”?

Easier yes, but it would also make it impossible to only have one or two notification actions.

The user will quickly and intuitively notice that the top actions show up in the notification.

That hasn't been my experience with users :)

[nomeata]

Easier yes, but it would also make it impossible to only have one or two notification actions.

Good point. Was just a quick idea, three lists are fine as well.

[jkuester]

@cketti, I have been doing some thinking about this (would still like to get a solution for the Archive option from https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/3403)! Just have been too busy lately. One of the things I am concerned with is how well a drag-and-drop interface would work on small touch screens where lots of scrolling would be necessary. Maybe I am not understanding what you are suggesting, though. Would this involve some kind of custom Preference class?

A simpler alternative I wanted to propose was just to have separate ListPreferences for each of the three action slots on the notification. For each slot, users could select which action they wanted to display from the drop-down (and have a "None" option so that you could have less than three actions). Then you could have a separate PreferenceCategory for the 5 ListPreferences for picking the Wear notifications (and a third PreferenceCategory for selecting the actions for the old grouped notifications.

I happened to notice, a couple days ago, that the https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms has a similar setup for their notifications preferences. Let me know what you think:

QKSMS:

[Grunthos]

Any chance of also allowing per-folder notifications? I have filters on my IMAP server that rate my mails according to probable importance,and, for example, I really only want a notification sound for the most important?

[flowgunso]

I don't know about the status of this enhancement, but that is a feature I'm really looking forward to.