Suggestion: Improvement for "email settings" in cpanel

Hello,

It has recently come to my attention that cpanel is once again actively interested and listening to suggestions and comments made on the forums.

Yea!

(At one point, many years ago, I made a lot of posts with ideas that I felt would increase the "usability" for cpanel. Most of those suggestions were ignored without comment.. and so over the years I just basically gave up.)

Well, since cpanel appears to be interested again.. and "user friendliness" is apparently back on the cpanel agenday.. I will once again make suggestions that I think will help make cpanel an "easier to use" control panel.

Here's my first one -- it is a result of another thread where a new cpanel user was confused about forwarding -vs- creating an email account.

Many of our new hosting customers have this same problem. They don't understand how email accounts differ from email forwarding, and sometimes they create an email account AND a forwarder, and then wind up with a big mailbox full of junk because all they needed was forwarding, etc...

THE SOLUTION

I think cpanel could easily avoid a lot of the common "new user" confusion over email configuration by reworking the cpanel "email section" pages a little. (OK, a lot.)

The "trick" is to put yourself in the mindset of the customer, and ask yourself what makes sense to the average customer who just wants to get all their email addresses set up.

Customers don't often understand "filters" and "forwarders" and "email accounts", etc. They just want to know how to configure their email addresses. They think about email addresses, and what options the email address should have. They don't understand that they need to go to the "forwarders" page, and not the "email accounts" page, but they do need to visit the "filters" page, etc...

Arg! Too complex for the average customer.

So instead of having the email section of cpanel based around all the individual "functionality" features that cpanel offers for email addresses..

... I think it would be more user-friendly if everything was on ONE "email configuration" page and then had all email options listed by email address. In other words, organize things by email address instead of "function".

This would be much more intuitive for the customer.

For example: (Sorry, this is difficult to explain with text/html.. I can draft up a screenshot if anyone is interested.)

---------------------

addy1@domain.com [ + ] (Click here to expand/show all options for this address)

(Then, when they click the "+" button (or whatever), it expands and shows them ALL the settings and features/options for that address. Like this:

------------------

addy1@domain.com [ - ]

[ ] Enable server storage mailbox? (email will be stored on the server in a POP3 mailbox until you download it with a mail program.)
- [__] Quota size in mb
- [__] Password

[ ] Enable forwarding? (email will be forwarded to the addresses listed below)
|---------|
|address1@forward.com
|address2@forward.com
|---------|

[ ] Enable auto-responder?
(Enter autoresponder options and message here)

[ ] Enable filtering?
(Enter filter options here)

​

The idea is that this way the customer can very easily see ALL the settings for their email addresses in one place, which is a lot more intuitive then organizing things by "function". With the scenario described above, customer can easily and quickly see everything that's going on for any given address. Everything is nice and clear.