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Customizing

Folder Storage Context Menu

Mnenhy adds a new item "Folder Storage" to the folder pane context menu. This menu both informs about the current folder's inheritance state and provides means of customizing the related data. All changes will be visible in every folder that is using the same data folder!

Example (based upon the table Data Folder Inheritance above):

Hiding the threadpane's "Date" column in Folder9 will hide it in all folders that are using the global settings, for instance in Folder3. Folder4 is not affected, because it does not inherit the settings of Folder3.

Per default (e.g. if the file mnenhy-folderstore.rdf in your profile is empty), all folders are inheriting the global settings. To reduce the amount of data stored, you can turn off the strict inheritance in the Folder Storage Preferences Panel (see screenshot below). When "Store only account-dependent data" is checked, only account folder can be data folders.

Layout

Without Mnenhy, every change to the threadpane column layout is visible to any folder. With Folder Storage in default configuration, it's the same. So how can this be changed?

• Select the folder you want to customize in the folderpane.
• From its context menu, remove the "Inherit parent data" checkmark.

That's all! Now every changes made to the threadpane layout while in this folder are only visible to this folder and all those that are inheriting his data, i.e. subfolders without own data. And if you want the folder to inherit its parent data again, just restore the checkmark. (You will be asked if you really want to lose its customized data.)

To ease the pain of customizing folders that do not fit nicely into the inheritance hierarchy but should have the same data, the context menu presents two more items:

• "Copy parent data hither"
  This is actually the same as removing the inheritance checkmark, but it can be useful to overwrite a misconfiguration in a child folder.
• "Copy data from here"
  If your operating system supports context menus for folders that are currently not selected, this method can be used to quickly copy data from one folder to another: First select the folder you want to copy the data to in the folderpane, then choose this menu item from the context menu of the folder you want to copy the data from.

If you want to edit the layout for folders where the threadpane isn't accessible (e.g. global or account layout), just edit the layout of any folder inheriting it.

Watching Preferences

Folder Storage Configuration Dialog


Folder Storage Preferences Panel

Apart from just storing threadpane layouts, a data folder can also watch preferences: you can define lists of preferences whose current value will be saved when leaving and restored when reentering the folder. This allows, for instance, to have HTML display enabled for all mails except those in the Junk folder.

To configure a folder's watched preferences, choose "Folder Configuration..." from its context menu. Make sure that the data folder is correct, you may want to make the current folder a data folder itself.

Use the "Add" and "Remove" buttons to customize the list of preferences watched by this data folder. The list is (currently) not sorted, entries appear in the order they were added.

Manipulating the list of watched preferences via these buttons can be tedious, though, so there is an import/export mechanism available:

• The "Export" button creates a text file of this format:

  //mnenhy=mailbox://pkdfglkjf@ergegre/c0/c1/c2
  user_pref("mailnews.display.html_as", 0);
  user_pref("mailnews.display.prefer_plaintext", false);
  user_pref("mailnews.display.disallow_mime_handlers", 0);
  

  This is the usual Mozilla prefs.js format, with special comments: a comment starting with //mnenhy= denotes the data folder this file was created from.
• The "Import" button expects a file in the format the "Export" button creates. Files without any special comment are also accepted, but if such a special comment is present, only the section matching the current data folder is processed. Valid preference settings are added to the current list of watched preferences.

Sharing such files is still not very comfortable when having many different folder configurations. And thus the Folder Storage Preferences Panel provides the "Export watched preferences"/"Import watched preferences" buttons that export/import all/many of such folder preferences at once.

If you don't want to watch user preferences, you can gain some machine cycles by turning the feature off in the Folder Storage Preferences Panel, but the effect is scarcely visible.

user_pref("extensions.mnenhy.log.folderstore", true);