Navigation doesn't work after trashing/archiving an email

[SoBeGuy]

When viewing an email, after selecting the option to trash or archive it, the arrow navigation buttons no longer work. Therefore, your only option is to return to the email list view. The expected behavior would be to navigate to the next or previous email in the folder that the trashed/archived email was originally in. This seems like a bug since the navigation buttons are active and clickable, but nothing happens when you click on them. This is happening in v8.4.0.

[yuri]

I think there's no easy fix. Maybe will be like this till the next minor release or longer.

[yuri]

Found a solution. Tricky one. https://github.com/espocrm/espocrm/issues/3166

[SoBeGuy]

I discovered a few more issues related to archiving.

A user assigned an email to me, which appeared in my All folder.

1. As you can see in the first screenshot, when I view the email in the list view, I'm able to archive it by selecting its checkbox and then selecting Archive from the action menu.
   
2. In the second screenshot, you can see there's no Archive option in the dropdown selector. I'd like to be able to archive individual emails from this menu in the list view.
   
3. The third screenshot shows that when the email is open in the main view, there's no option to archive it.
   

[yuri]

> A user assigned an email to me

There's no email assignment feature out of the box.

EDIT. Actually, we have Assigned User (hidden by default) which I forgot about.

It's possible to Archive only emails related to the user through the "users" relationship. Such emails are considered as located in the user's Inbox. It's how it has been working with Trash and other folder. It's not an issue.

> As you can see in the first screenshot, when I view the email in the list view, I'm able to archive it by selecting its checkbox and then selecting Archive from the action menu.

Archive as a mass action is available when the All folder is selected. But it will have effect only for emails that are in the user's Inbox. The issue that it can appear like it was moved what needs to be fixed. Or maybe, we'd better remove Archive and Trash action when All is selected for simplicity.

On the screenshot you can see "View Users" action. It will show all users who have this email in their Inbox. You can check whether your User is in the list.

Treat the "All" folder as the ability to see Inboxes of other users. You cannot move emails of other users to your folder unless an email became yours.

[SoBeGuy]

I understand, but is there a way for a user to add the email to the inbox of another user? Perhaps when an email is assigned to a user, it could automatically be added to their inbox?

[yuri]

> Perhaps when an email is assigned to a user

It should already work that way. Just tested.

[SoBeGuy]

Well, the email was assigned to me but it didn't go to my inbox. I had to find it by filtering the All box by emails assigned to me. Also, when I view the Users list for the email, I'm not listed as one of the users.

[yuri]

How exactly it was assigned? Do you have the "Assigned User" field in the side panel in Emails?

[SoBeGuy]

Yes, it was assigned using that field.

[yuri]

Is the problem reproducible for you? If you assign another email to somebody.

[SoBeGuy]

From my admin account, I can assign an email to a user and that user shows up in the email's View Users screen. When I login as a regular user and try to assign an email to my admin account, the assignment works but I don't show up in the list of users. Also, I don't receive any notification of the assignment. Therefore, this seems to be a permissions issue. My regular users have Assignment Permission = ALL. So even though the user can successfully assign me an email, something is preventing them from linking the email to me.

[yuri]

I tried to assign an email by a regular user to an admin user. The admin user appeared in the Users. Before assignment, it was not there.

[yuri]

Maybe someone else experienced the same problem and could chime in.

The ability to assign emails is kind of atavism. It was not supposed to be there.

[SoBeGuy]

Well, it's a pretty important feature, so I hope you don't remove it. When you have a team of users sharing an inbox, users need to be able to assign emails to one another. For example, if a particular team member has been working with a customer, other team members may want to assign emails from that customer to that team member. Or certain team members may have expertise in dealing with certain subjects. In this case, a team member was unable to handle an issue, so she escalated it to me, which is another common use case.

While it's great that Espo has email integrated into the CRM, I feel like it's not up to modern standards in terms of treating email as a first-class entity, equivalent to tasks. In the traditional paradigm, email was considered a means of communication, not independently actionable. In the modern paradigm, we have apps like Missive, Front and many others that treat emails as tasks. When a customer emails a request, it's often more efficient to treat the email as actionable and assign it to a user, rather than having to create a separate task. Moreover, when you create a task from an email, instead of making the email the parent object, Espo inserts a manual link back to the email in the notes. This seems like a workaround and an example of what I mean about email not being a first-class entity.

In Missive, emails are organized in threads and team members can add inline comments within each thread, tagging other users to bring them into the conversation. It's similar to how streams work in Espo, except the email conversation is part of the stream. Thus, team members can chat privately to comment on the email thread and discuss how to respond. You could sort of simulate this in Espo by adding a stream to email, but it wouldn't really work since Espo treats each email as independent, rather than part of a thread. Adding support for email threads and associating the stream with a thread, rather than individual emails, would go a long way toward making Espo more productive in terms of how it handles email.

I apologize for the long digression. I know it's unrelated to the technical issue, but when you mentioned that it's not even supposed to support assigning emails, I felt that it warranted a more general response.