On Thu, 15 Apr 2010 17:18:30 -0400, Jesse Rosenthal <jrosenthal@jhu.edu> wrote:
> Which is all just to say that I think that archiving is just a special
> case of tagging/untagging, and that the issues raised here should be
> considered across the larger general case.

I do agree that archiving is just a special-case of
tagging/untagging. And fortunately, I think the implementation matches
that, so consistency will be natural here.

You're also making the claim that the tagging behavior should be
consistent between the search-results and thread-content views and that
makes a lot of sense.

Earlier in your message, you wrote:

> However, when I have a long thread, and only one message in the inbox,
> tagging the thread, of course, tags all the messages in it "to-reply."
> Now, the way to do it might be to just change my habits, and only tag
> while in show-mode, as opposed to search-mode. But this does seem to be
> in conflict with the way I intuitively want to handle my mail, and I
> imagine I'm not the only one.

It's funny, because for a while we did have the tag operation in the
search view affecting only the messages that actually matched the
search. The problem we ran into was that if you archived a message from
the search view and then wanted to undo that, the "+ inbox" operation
would not work, (since archiving the messages made them no longer match
the current search).

We "fixed" that by making the tag operations affect all messages in the
thread.

It occurs to me that the real bug here is that the tag operation is
re-executing the search, rather than simply acting on the set of
messages being displayed. And that's a bug we've recently discussed and
want to fix.

Once we fix that, I think we can go back to having tag operations only
affect matched messages in the search view, and I agree that this will
be extremely convenient.

-Carl