The fact that you know what a GnuPG keyring is means that you are in 
the 1% of users.

We have Horde/IMP installations that have *millions* of users.  These 
are "Gmail"  type users - they want a simple e-mail client.  Most of 
them only have 1 identity.  This would thus be adding a feature that 
would potentially negatively affect the 99% of users while only 
benefitting 1% of users.

That doesn't mean it can't be done.  But that means you have to think 
out the UI/UX before going forward so that those 99% of users AREN'T 
affected just to give advanced functionality for a few.
At the beginning of the project, we had several usability experts give 
us input on this.  Their overwhelming recommendation is that those 
special mailboxes are necessary for the 99%.  Most people only use a 
couple of mailboxes.  These mailboxes tend to be the special 
mailboxes.  Thus, those special mailboxes need to be in view and 
present at all times.
For the record - I have something like 200 mailboxes.  And I have 
never thought there is inadequate space in the mailbox list.
We would consider a patch for this.  But it's going to take a bunch of 
work to abstract this.  Especially since the current code in 
javascript is designed with the special mailboxes section in mind and 
there is the Folder Actions menu that would need to be placed 
somewhere (quite honestly, it doesn't make much sense to put at the 
top of the list, above INBOX, so that's a question that needs to be 
addressed before anything is done).

The custom icon data is already abstracted and completely independent 
of the special mailbox location, so there's nothing to do there.
This is exactly what the special_mboxes backends.php config option is 
for.  Granted, this is a config file only, as opposed to a 
user-editable thing.  But that is simply because nobody has taken the 
time to write the UI for it.  It neither interests me greatly, nor has 
anyone funded the work, so that's why it doesn't exist.

Hi Michael,

I have been using Horde 3 for years now and want to migrate to Horde 
5. The issue with the sent-mail folders is a usability blocker for me 
atm.
The people around me (e.g. in my GnuPG keyring) have 3 UIDs / 
identities or more. So that point is not taken.

Also frankly said, I could completely do without the special folder 
container and just have all folders in one tree. The special folder 
container takes up so much space (more than half of the sidebar with 
all my sent-mail folders in it). The rest of the mailbox tree is 
buried under it. So, for me another option would be to have the 
special folder container removed completely (including the INBOX) and 
have all those folders re-intregated into the mailbox tree  (I have 
already tested that). Though with a removal of the special folders 
container, I would love to have custom icons for INBOX, sent-mail, 
trash, templates, drafts.

Furthermore, I have other ,,important'' folders (mail filtered into 
them by sieve) that I cannot add to the special folders container 
(apart from using the config part in the backend, but that's not user 
specific, but backend specific, so no option). However, this is 
nothing that can be easily worked into the current special folder 
implementation (IMHO).

The special container as of now is great for standard mailboxes, but 
not very generically configurable. If I have a non-standard mail 
account like mine (containing something like 500.000 mails from server 
logs and mailing lists) its actually more in the way then of any help.
But still, I would have eight sent-mail folders (all with the same 
name shown, stripped off of their full paths / parent folder names) 
dangling around.  A combination of both (selectable sent-mail folders 
and an extra container) would be cool ;-).

light+love,
Mike

Quite frankly, the number of people that have more than 2-3 identities 
is extremely small.  So adding an additional parameter just for this 
few people is not a great idea.

A better solution would instead be to store all sent mailboxes in a 
separate container.  This method requires no configuration and works 
for all setups.

With multiple identities, the sidebar container (dynamic IMP) gets
crunched with ,,Sent'' folders. Having four or more identities already starts
reducing the usability of the sidebar folder navigation quite a bit.
Especially if the folders are named equally (with different parent folders,
of course).

A solution to this is a new IMP::Pref parameter 
('sent_mail_folder_is_special')
which allows the user to select if an identity's sent-mail folder is 
supposed to
show up in the special folder container of the sidebar or not.