New Mail UI discussion

As someone who's spent some hours with email and M2 in particular, I'd like to discuss the new mail UI.

The new UI looks calm and modern, which is certainly good to get folks to use this great email client.

There are however some things that I believe require improvement. Here are my personal views that I just hope will be taken into account for whatever changes are still to come.

I'm talking only about the default settings here, which is list on left, message on right.

1. Mix of sender and subject
   In the 'old' list view, all senders were listed in one column and all subjects in the second column and so on. Consequently, it's very easy to mentally mask one's view to only subjects or only senders when searching for an email in a list of emails.
   
   In the new list view, every second line is a subject and every other second line is the sender of the email. I find it much harder to quickly find the one email I am looking for in this 'columnless' way of presenting the list of emails, because I am constantly switching between apples and oranges.
   
   Maybe adding some hint of color or indention may do the trick? (I know that I can switch to list top, message below. I'm talking about the default...)
   
   .
2. Subject before sender
   This is related to the point above. I don't like seeing the subject above the sender's name rather than below it (This may be personal preference). I deem the sender more important than the subject, as I rarely have 2 emails from the same person but with different subjects in Unread. I know what the email is about when I see who sent it. The importance/priority is generally a function of sender, not of the subject line. Also, subjects are often indescriptive. Ever seen subjects looking like this? "Re: AW: WG: Re: FWD: AW: Re: hello" ... I get that a lot.
   
   In the 2-line list view, the subject just gets in the way.
   
   .
3. Threaded emails
   In the 'old' list view, threads are very easy to find due to the prominent black triangle in the subject column. Also, threaded mode would clearly indent the subject of following emails, making it very easy to grasp the structure of the thread at first glance.
   
   In the new list view, the + symbol is almost invisible. Upon a click, the opened threaded email should be indented a bit more; indentation only becomes clearly visible when you have a thread of more than 2 emails.
   
   Also in the standard setup there's the awkward situation that only in the thread, newer emails are shown below older emails, whereas new emails outside threads are added on top of the list. Add to that email clients that don't properly include message IDs breaking the thread (webinterfaces, mostly) and you have havoc in your list.
   
   New on top and threads is simply inconsistent, and thus not very good for a default setup... but I do see that new on top is a consequence of choosing list left, message right instead of list top, message bottom.
   
   So your algorithm for judging whether or not an email is part of a thread must be more nifty if you default-order new on top. And threads must be more clearly distinguishable from individual emails.
   
   .
4. Expand message
   What is it good for? Doesn't seem to add any value apart from eye candy. You could maybe use it to also show threaded emails in the message pane. Suggestion: use the space gained by 'unexpanding' the message to preview attachments. BTW, the button tooltip doesn't change when I switch states.
   
   .
5. Scrolling
   I don't like that the current position of my mouse pointer decides whether I'm scrolling the list or the message. I like to move the mouse pointer out of the way. The effect is that I tend to scroll the list instead of the message and vice versa. Also, if I have the message 'unexpanded' with the shadow effect and all, and I have the mouse pointer in the message pane but outside of the actual message (over the background), the mouse wheel will scroll the message list. Inconsistent. I*d like to click first, then scroll.
   
   .
6. Pin messages
   Uhm... ain't this just another 'important' label? Anyway, the pin is too small. How can I pin an email in the list Clicking the empty circle in the list is not obvious / why is the button only available in the message pane / why is there no context menu entry for pinning emails?
   
   Why is the 'Pinned' filter between Received and Outbox? I don't see a reason to place it there. I would rather place it beneath Unread or, IMO better, in the labels category. Generally, I think it should be made more obvious what pinning emails is useful for. The big black dot appearing is a) not enough and b) replaces the very useful icon showing whether I have replied to that email or not. Highlight the email in the message list by adding some colored background or sumptin'
   
   .
7. The 'thread' button
   Pressed it without knowing what it'd do. Boom, received shrinks to a single email that happened to be marked and that was not part of a thread --> "Where are all my emails?". How does a user new to M2 know how to get back to the view he had before? Pressing the button a second time should bring me back to where I was before.
   
   More importantly, this button is redundant with the little + button in the list (well, apart from hiding all the other mails around the thread). I don't see the point of this button. If you want to advertise threading (good choice), this button is not the way to go.
   
   .
8. The wrench
   I shouldn't have two separate buttons for setting sorting orders in the list and in the message panes. In particular, the wrench button in the message pane sets the sorting order, which is only relevant for the list pane. That doesn't make any sense; the wrench button should be placed in the list pane (I only noticed it after playing with this mail build for more than 2 hours). Finally, sorting order "ascending" in the message pane seems to overrule the sorting order of the sorting order button in the list pane.
   
   .
9. The day/month/year accordeon
   Add a bit of animation when clicking on the day/month/year... Also, I find that when I want to expand 'september' I am more likely to click on 'august' (probably because it's beneath september, and I want to see what's in september?... funny psychology at work). A bit of animation may solve this problem, because it makes it more visible what's actually happening when I click on 'september'. Currently it's "clickDONE!".
   
   .
10. Buttons Spam/Not Spam; Read/Unread
    The difference between the 'Spam' and 'not Spam' states of the corresponding button is hardly visible. Dark grey versus black. Read/Unread turns blue. Inconsistent.
    Also, the tooltip is always "Read" ("Spam") and never "Unread" ("Not spam"). Both are denotions of a state, not of an action. "Reply" is an action. So the tooltip currently showing "Read" ("Spam") should become "Mark as read"/"Mark as unread" ("Mark as spam"/"Mark as not spam")

Lots of criticisms, but I have to say that for a change this big, I don't feel too startled. Seems like a job well done requiring just a bit of tweaking.

I agree to all of your points (at least up to point 9 as I don't mind for spam/read buttons). Especially the settings are quite weired. For quite some time I was hoping that you would not only focus on a modern design of Opera but also rework the thousands of settings that can be found everywhere: settings, appearance, mail and chat accounts, opera:config, ... The mail client alone has hundreds of places to configure it:
* fonts in settings,
* panels/tool bars in appearence,
* mail sections in view setting on top of the panel,
* subsection view settings on top of each section,
* list view,
* mail appearence,
* ... (I'm sure I didn't cover everything)
And then you add default view settings! in the messages section! That's the last place I'd search for such a thing!
That was to emphasize the whole settings problem a bit.

Now I have to add some points to WildEnte's list:

Mail Panel Entries Take Up Too Much Space
I tend to have a lot of labels. Now I have an even longer list due to relatively large spaces between the separate entries which requires more scrolling and less overview.

Only One Label Is Shown
Up until now I was able to change the labels column to see more than one or two labels now only one (guess the last selected) is shown as icon which is strange, given they are "labels". The real problem though is: how can I tell which labels is this message in? Currently I can only click the icon and skim through the whole label tree so see which labels are selected.
You could try to place multiple label icons next to each other and/or show the label (with the actual label along the icons) in the message section and/or show a tooltip with the labels when hovering the label(s) icon.

Side note to that: the default icons are counter intuitive! Now the messages I've marked as "Todo" are shown as done and those marked as "wait for respone" are shown as being answered already.

I agree with you on most of those. Changing the scrolling behavior as you mentioned would be inconsistent with the rest of the UI though. Every other part of Opera scrolls when the mouse is over it (which I like because I don' have to click before I can scroll, so I guess it's mostly a personal preference thing).

I have another suggestion for the accordion view as well: Keep an accordion header at the top of the screen at all times. This would let you see which time period you are in at all times.
For example, when scrolling down through the list, you get something like this:

Originally posted by WildEnte:

Also in the standard setup there's the awkward situation that only in the thread, newer emails are shown below older emails, whereas new emails outside threads are added on top of the list.

See this post.

Originally posted by WildEnte:

Expand messageWhat is it good for? Doesn't seem to add any value apart from eye candy. You could maybe use it to also show threaded emails in the message pane. Suggestion: use the space gained by 'unexpanding' the message to preview attachments. BTW, the button tooltip doesn't change when I switch states.

I want the message expanded all the time and to take up as much room as possible. But, apparently some users have super duper wide screens where they get super long lines of text. Making the message shorter makes it easier to read, in that situation.

Originally posted by WildEnte:

Pin messagesUhm... ain't this just another 'important' label?

In a way, yes. But, it's tied to the IMAP \Flagged flag, so the "important" label can't be used as it's tied to a keyword for compatibility with Thunderbird.

I'd rather have a "Flagged" or "Starred" *label" that shows \Flagged messages. But, calling it "Pinned" and putting it under "All Messages" isn't too much of a problem for me. Pinning a message in the message list instead of clicking the pin above an open message is indeed a little difficult. As a workaround, you can add a label with \Flagged as the keyword for flagging messages. It won't show flagged messages though because \Flagged is a flag and not a keyword.

Originally posted by WildEnte:

There are however some things that I believe require improvement.

Pretty much agree with all the stuff you listed, except for the notes above.

Note though for for buttons locations, it's a little difficult to get everything perfect for all the differ mail view modes, with the way Opera is currently set up. The default button layout i guess is a good compromise.

The circle for pinning is extremely hard to hit with the touch pad of a notebook with a high resolution screen (120ppi) - the clickable area is smaller than 1mm in diameter.

Reuse of the same icon (wrench) for different actions is very bad if it is on the same screen.

The actual pin icon (in the message header after selecting a message) is a lot easier to hit.

That's true, but if you want to pin or unpin a whole bunch of messages without opening every message, the small circle is a PITA in my configuration.

Fair enough. I can't find a way to pin a message from the right click menu either.

Originally posted by spadija:

I can't find a way to pin a message from the right click menu either.

Right now at least, you can add it to the menu yourself (untested though). You need to add something like:

Item, "Pin Message"=Flag Message

under "[Mail Item Popup Menu]" in standard_menu.ini.

Under "ctrl + f12 -> advanced -> toolbars", duplicate the menu", edit it in the menu folder in the preferences folder, select the menu setup and apply.

But, that will make the context menu taller, obviously. Might be better to put it under the "Mark" submenu and call it "Mark as flagged".

It will work as a flag toggle. But, it doesn't seem to work in the message list at the moment, only when right-clicking an opened message.

First of all, thanks for the thorough review and ideas for improvements, we very much appreciate constructive feedback!

Originally posted by WildEnte:

Mix of sender and subject In the 'old' list view, all senders were listed in one column and all subjects in the second column and so on. Consequently, it's very easy to mentally mask one's view to only subjects or only senders when searching for an email in a list of emails.

Yes, it's indeed not as trivial to differentiate subjects from sender in the two lined list right now, but if you test the old style of having columns when the list is on the left it's not easy to see anything at all. You can see that there's actually a very small colour difference between subjects and senders when they are unread, we'll try to do something nicer here. It's by no means locked in the current state. In fact, I'd say that it's easier to change things now, for us developers.

Originally posted by WildEnte:

Subject before sender: This is related to the point above. I don't like seeing the subject above the sender's name rather than below it (This may be personal preference). I deem the sender more important than the subject

The first internal builds had the sender on the first line together with the date and label. I'd say the current state of things is much better because:
* the subject often needs more space than the sender's email or name
* if it's part of a thread and the subject is the second line, the subject will be in between two senders, which I think makes thing more messy (since we don't repeat the subject for each message in a thread):

Sender's name
Subject
   Sender of first reply
      Sender of second reply

Originally posted by WildEnte:

Ever seen subjects looking like this? "Re: AW: WG: Re: FWD: AW: Re: hello" ... I get that a lot.In the 2-line list view, the subject just gets in the way

This is why we want the subject only to be visible for the first email in a thread. We plan to eventually work on detecting when a thread changes subject and split up a thread and fix threads that are broken because of a mail client who doesn't include Reply-To or References headers..

Originally posted by WildEnte:

Expand message: What is it good for? Doesn't seem to add any value apart from eye candy.

It does add value if you open the message in a separate tab or have list on top, or if you have a very wide screen. But indeed it needs more work. We wanted to know if people thought it was useful or not, but I think it's one of those things you change once and never touch again. So the default needs to be good and the preference should perhaps be in the popup dialog.

Originally posted by ugly95:

The day/month/year accordion Add a bit of animation when clicking on the day/month/year...

Originally posted by spadija:

Keep an accordion header at the top of the screen at all times.

I'd love this, but it would need quite a bit of work (though not impossible). The code for this tree view is very different from the mail panel which does animate. This goes for spadija's idea as well unfortunately.

Originally posted by hobe:

The mail client alone has hundreds of places to configure it

Yep, but we have to start in one end! We didn't really add all of these preferences in the two dialogs, we're just trying to present them in a way that makes sense (split global settings from view specific settings). We'll continue to improve these preference dialogs... With the introduction of YAML based dialogs and UI, they are a lot easier to both create and maintain.

Several of the other things you guys mention are just regular bugs that don't need much discussion (just fixing) so just keep an eye on the snapshots and check if they are fixed. If they aren't when we're closing in on the final release of 11.60, shout out!

Has anybody made a custom feed.css yet? Or tweaked the widgets.yaml?

Originally posted by alexremen:

Has anybody made a custom feed.css yet? Or tweaked the widgets.yaml?

Yes, I exchanged the helvarial fonts to "lucida sans unicode", enlarged the main text and modified the colors and I want to shrink the feed headlines, but and it is not so easy without knowing what is what in the css, especially because we can't use DF to look into the source. Some documentation would be welcome.

btw: Why just Arial and not Arial Unicode MS in front of Arial in the font stack? Arial has a poor Unicode support and depending on the system settings the fallback for a not covered character can be in a a different font.

edit: OK, found it. The size of the feed headline is in the yaml, but the padding is defined in the skin - such a distribution of values is error prone.

I like the new UI a lot. In fact, I like it so much that I started using the mail client for all my mails since the new UI. 11.60 is already in Beta, but I hope that there's time to fix at least some of the mentioned issues. I'm pretty sure that some small fixes can make a big difference in usability.

- There are two wrench icons in the mail pane, both with the same tooltip (at least in Dutch). This is quite confusing, even for a 'more experienced' user like me. I do understand the idea of two places to configure two different things, I do not understand two identical icons. (Maybe an 'eye' icon for editing the view?)
- On MacOS X it's quite hard to expand a thread; you either have to click the upper part of the plus sign or above the plus sign.
- It's way too easy to open the label menu when you just want to click an e-mail
- A thread should be sorted in the mail list using the date/time of the latest mail in that thread
- It should be easier to read an entire thread, I would like to have an entire thread expanded on the right side
- Going to the mail client via the E-mail menu in the menu bar brings me to my unread messages, I'd like to see my entire inbox (a setting somewhere?)
- This one's probably just for OS X: the 'remove mail' button should be a trash bin, not some 'do not park here' sign.

Regarding feeds:
- The titles are huge, the 'full article' link is tiny
- Styling of the 'full article' link is different in some news items. Quite random some links have the new styling and some links show the entire url.

Originally posted by Pimz:

Regarding feeds:- The titles are huge, the 'full article' link is tiny- Styling of the 'full article' link is different in some news items. Quite random some links have the new styling and some links show the entire url.

I confirm this... It's quite annoying and feels wrong... Title is huge, "Full article" link is tiny... First one should definitely be smaller, the second one bigger...

Title should be even smaller and shouldn't stick to the top in "horizontal mode"...

Alex, it's good to see that our input gets heard!

About the 'expand message' point: I had a discussion with a friend of mine and we figured that in a list left, message right setup, you could use the state where the message is somewhat smaller on top of a background (I'll call it 'box' now) to show the entire thread. So each message has its own box, they are beneath each other and indented a bit depending on their hierarchy in the thread. So you could scroll through the thread in the message pane, or you jump to a specific message by clicking in the list pane.

As an aside, if the thread contains a message from a contact of mine that I have an picture for, showing the contact's picture in the message header toolbar would also help quickly seeing whose message I'm looking at.

Overall, I like that threads get more emphasis in this UI. But that really means that you need to find a good solution to the fact that threading requires new message below, whereas list pane on the left almost requires message on top. But as we know, you can only be creative if you need to solve some sort of conflict (c:=

Threaded emails
When you use the list and message on right, even clicking on ">" doesn't show the other threaded emails but on other views it works well.

Expand message
I didn't see till now a good working for that
Well... it doesn't work on "list and message on right", but in other views (about the "list only", you need open the message in a tab) it works.

The 'thread' button

Also I don't know what it'd do.

I have a 4:3 screen, is it possible to move the left side of new mail view on top of existing right one?
So it would resemble the old view, but preserving the new look.

Originally posted by kriko:

I have a 4:3 screen, is it possible to move the left side of new mail view on top of existing right one?
So it would resemble the old view, but preserving the new look.

Try setting opera:config#Mail|MailViewTwoLinedMessages to "2".

@Pimz: Thank you!

I like the new accordeon style in the list of mails, but I miss a feature (didn't see anything in config):
When I minimize all the subsections so I only see recent posts (maybe "today" down to last month) but hide everything else and then close Opera, after restart everything is back in the extended state.

It would be nice if the last state was memorized. Either that or some kind of setting that lets me choose how far back I want to see my mails in the extended accordeon view. This way the accordeon would also help to find mails from a year ago since that label wont be far down on the list.

@ XBuster

You can !, Sort of.

While in mail view, Right click a toolbar and select 'Customize/Appearance...', Then click the 'Buttons' tab and select 'Mail view' from the list on the left. On the right there should be a button labeled 'Forever' (Fourth one up from the bottom). Drag that button to a convenient place on your mail toolbar and click 'OK' to close the 'Appearance' dialog. Now click the newly added button and select from the available options 'Today', 'Week', 'Month', 'Three Months', 'Year' or 'Forever' to display only messages that fit the selected criteria.

Hope that helps, And is something like what you were looking for.

Thank you for the hint.

Unfortunately, that is not what I was looking for. While it does let me choose to only see mails from last month, it simply hides the rest; You can't go farther back, unless you switch it back to 'forever'.
I was hoping for a way to have all the accordion sections older than a month (the time frames the other button has seem perfect) in the unexpanded state. This way I could quickly search for mail in 2006 (ok, there's only a '2008' section and after that the 'older' section right now) by simply clicking on that section without scrolling forever to even get there (I got mails dating back to 2004).

Two more wishes:

Please don't let gray be the new black for text, it is hard to read for some people - i.e. dates are important for some people, so they should be well visible and not grayed out.
Please add a high contrast setting and exchange the gradient-like backgrounds behind the accordion labels against solid ones.

Is it possible to disable the new thread date sorting mechanism (where a thread's "date" is considered the date of the newest message)? It's pretty hard to keep track of discussions on newsgroups when the threads and their branches keep jumping around all the time.

For Feeds:

The title is huge, it really doesn't need to be this big and prominent.
It looks particularly unbalanced with the "Full article" link being tiny.

Also the title shouldn't stick to the top when I scroll down, that space could be better used for the actual content of the feed I'm reading. As is the giant title always stuck to the top seems as though it's trying to draw my attention to the title at all times and away from the feed content.

Some more points:

* There is no visual difference between collapsed and open time frames in the list pane ("today, yesterday, last week ...").

* When listing new emails at the bottom, and I have (say) 4 emails in "today" at the very bottom of the list. I click "today" and the 4 emails get hidden. I click "today" again and the 4 emails are still hidden, because now the scrollbar is not at the bottom. This is inconvenient. When sorting the list such that new stuff is at the bottom, the scrollbar should prefer to be all the way at the bottom (it's the same way around for new on top).

Here are a couple of pretty fundamental conceptual suggestions:

* Split the 'all messages' category into 'all messages' and 'Current items' (you'll find a better name), with 'current items' containing Unread, Pinned, Drafts, Spam and Outbox; 'All messages' containing Archive (see below), Received, Sent, Trash.

* Add an access point "Archive" showing all received and all sent mail, and defaulting to threading. Make sure that there's a neat visual distinction between sent and received. (why? currently 'receives' also shows sent mail when using threaded, which is contradictory to its name...)

* With an Archive Access point, Received should default to showing only received emails and sent should default to showing only sent emails (i.e., no threading).

Somewhat repeating myself:

* The wrench button should REALLY be shown at the top of the list pane and integrate the "sorting for..." button into the wrench menu. The items in the wrench menu have nothing to do with the particular email I'm currently looking at. Absolutely nothing.

* The "Pinned" access point should be between Unread and Received, not between Received and Outbox, in any case. Why? Because pinned messages are special (like unread), whereas messages in 'Received' are not and messages in Outbox are almost never in that access point. So you place very special emails between everything and nothing. Under Unread it just makes more sense.

Originally posted by spadija:

I have another suggestion for the accordion view as well: Keep an accordion header at the top of the screen at all times. This would let you see which time period you are in at all times.
For example, when scrolling down through the list, you get something like this:

+1
Totally agree with this, I have this functionality on my BlackBerry and love it !

Originally posted by WildEnte:

Subject before sender.
I deem the sender more important than the subject

+1! Exactly, I also find the Sender to be much more important than the subject, not only that, the standard in other mail clients generally put the Sender before the Subject.

Originally posted by WildEnte:

In the 'old' list view, all senders were listed in one column and all subjects in the second column and so on. Consequently, it's very easy to mentally mask one's view to only subjects or only senders when searching for an email in a list of emails.

I've managed (eventually, with help!) to get it back to the old way, a list view with a column for each of sender, subject, date, etc.

Can I have a group by sender option, or at least sort? I used to use sort by sender regularly to clean out my spam folder. It's easy to blow through 1000s of spam emails in a few minutes by deleting everything from a given sender in one go. Any any random emails from people you know that got thrown in the spam folder will stand out.

Originally posted by eauxpie:

Can I have a group by sender option, or at least sort? I used to use sort by sender regularly to clean out my spam folder. It's easy to blow through 1000s of spam emails in a few minutes by deleting everything from a given sender in one go. Any any random emails from people you know that got thrown in the spam folder will stand out.

You can group by sender like before, by clicking on the column headings. But the trouble is in 12.00 it doesn't work properly. It groups first by day, then by sender within each day. Very strange

Sorry, I should have been clear. I'm running the "List and message on right" layout (the default one). I realize now that the other layouts allow me to turn off grouping and use the column header to sort by sender as I used to.

Still, it would make more sense to add sort and group by sender to the "settings for this view" popup. Having to configure your mail view to a non-default layout and turn off features (grouping) to get the behavior I want seems strange, especially since it should work just fine with the new sorting/grouping behavior.

THANKYOU! I never thought to look for turn off grouping, I thought it was forced! Now I can find things!!!!!!

Just to add - sometimes email is not sorted by time correctly.

Comparing an email from me to myself (the first one) and an email from a friend to myself (the second one) - I've changed the IP addresses of our computers to xx.xx.xx.xx:

Received: from i7-940 ([xx.xx.xxx.xxx]) by avasout03 with smtp id
2enC1i0033RKXMs01enD7R; Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:47:14 +0000
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:47:09 -0000

Received: from [xx.xx.xxx.xx] by web26901.mail.ukl.yahoo.com via HTTP; Mon, 28
Nov 2011 10:52:14 GMT
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:52:14 -0000

I notice a slightly different format in the Received header from the server (if that's what puts the longer header in there). But the Date header, which is put in by our own computers I think, is the same. Something is confusing Opera's sorting mechanism.

Opera sorts these as the top one being EARLIER, when it clearly isn't, it was sent at 14:47 instead of 10:52.

Correction again!!! The above ONLY occurs if you sort to have the newest emails at the bottom of the list. If you sort to have the newest emails at the top of the list (UGH!), then they are in the correct order.

And I spotted another pair - BOTH from me to myself, so obviously in the same date format, but two DAYS apart, sorted incorrectly!

I agree on points 1 & 2 (the rest I haven't really noticed since I haven't played with it too much).

In most e-mail clients you generally have the sender in the left column and then the next column is the subject line. So, reading left to right, you notice the sender first. And, I agree, the sender is usually much more important than the subject line. So the sender field should be the focal point when you first glance at your mail list.

I don't know if it really matters if the subject line is in the top row and the sender is underneath, I just think the sender field should jump out at you a bit more. Right now it seems to blend together. Simply making the sender field bold, or a darker colour might be enough.

I like the idea of having 'Quick Reply' off by default. It makes sense because I think you would normally want as much view area as possible to read your e-mail.

I know that it's not terribly difficult to switch it on by going to the 'View' menu and checking the option to show it.

But I think it would be nice to have a visible toggle button available. Maybe stick it under the date and 'Expand Message' button. That way if you want to do a quick reply, just click the toggle button and bring up the quick reply box quickly and easily. And after you send your quick reply the quick reply box would return to being off.

Or maybe simply have the Quick Reply feature with a drop down button, sort of like the one used to hide and expand the 'To:' field.