Planning a social networking site with a private messaging system, including following folders:
- inbox
- sentbox
- drafts
- trash
and labels that can be created, managed by the users and applied in a n:n way (1 message can have multiple labels, one label can be applied to multiple messages), basically like in Gmail.
My Questions are:
when showing the messages in inbox, you see the information from the user who sent it to you, in the sentbox I thought of showing the information to whom the message was sent. Is this a good idea?
the question resulting in that is, that if you can delete messages from the inbox as well as from the sentbox, you will not be able to distinguish them, unless you mark them with a big "SENT" and "INBOX" and "TRASH" label. Email clients and programs handle this in different ways, some always show the user who sent the message (if this was you, then it always shows you and you don't see on the first sight to whom you have sent it), others do it the other way round.
What is your opinion - what is better and less confusing for the user?
And: what would you think if I only let users put messages from the inbox into trash and all other messages would get delted permanently (of course you communicate this to the users in modal dialog boxes)?