11.6/12 new mail layout: make mail body not that narrow ?

How to maky mail body still take all the available width, rather than only ~40% of it ?
It seems to have max width constraint to make it fancy and glamour, but that also means lot of screen space is wasted and user has to position mouse carefully, before scrolling with wheel would start to work.

maybe this new design is nice for iPads and other 1000-px wide screens, or using MS-Office-like layout, but desktop screen with width like 1600/1920 and traditional layout body-below-list it is just a space wasted.

Originally posted by the-Arioch:

How to maky mail body still take all the available width, rather than only ~40% of it ?

Click the wrench icon and check "maximize messages". It's the default for "list and message on right". But, you might have to change it if you use 'list and message below" or "list only".

Thanks for the hint.

I had upgraded two computers with 11.52 on Win7 to 11.60 and it only was default for MS-Office side-by-side layout in both cases.

Also it was translated into russian (back-translating) as "unroll messages" which was very cryptic. And there was no mouse-hover help on that cryptic item either.

Okay, the mystery is solved and this issue is left apart; hope translation would be fixed.

But default mail layout is still "commercials show over usability".

http://ge.tt/9H2noxA/v/0

If you don't like the short width of the messages, click the wrench icon and check "maximize messages". You can also right-click on the header bar for the message and just to expand it.

For some of the other stuff, you can shift + drag icons from one toolbar to another or use "shift + F12 -> buttons -> defaults/mail/mail view" and drag what you want to the toolbar you want. You can also right-cick on a button and remove it from a toolbar.

Things are kind of optimized for "list and message on right". If you use "list and message below", you might want to move the icons around to the toolbars you want to shorten mouse travel.

The customize headers option when right-clicking appears consistently for me.

As for headers wasting space, work on headers is still happening I believe.

> and check "maximize messages".
i did already, thanks again for the hint.

However both translation and default settings were awfull.
BTW, the fact that opera switched to side-by-side layout by default on upgrade is also either bug or most probably negligence.
This layout was already present in at least 10.x lineup, so it is not new feature but rather redressing of older one. And if user disliked that in 10.x then it is not nice behavior to insist on switch again.

As for re-arranging toolbars, i'll do it later as i got more experience how i really use mail.
But again that is poorly choosen defaults.
Given that defaults are already separate for left-right and top-bottom layouts (wrench buttons are jumping between bars), it is strange they did so oor defaults for top-bottom.

And quite probably i'd end with removing ALL the buttons from body toolbar, which will collapse it to... 1 px splitter ? 0 px invisible bar ? gray empty 20 px band ? Dunno. In 11.5x if i remove all buttons from it, it still was reused by headers thus no space was wasted. With new design i just see no reason to have two toolbars and still 3rd toolbar for headers of the message directly above the body. 3 toolbars with intermixed purposes is way too much.

I wonder if Opera has consistent opinion about what they would want the headers to behave like...
It seems as very short bursts of ad hoc tweaking to me with no far sight at all :-(

Originally posted by burnout426:

The customize headers option when right-clicking appears consistently for me.

i believe u did not customized headers in earlier Opera releases.
It seems okay for some headers, and missing for others.
I suspect that it is affected by settings like "show on new line" or "arrange to the right" that are hidden (but inherited) in 11.60

Originally posted by burnout426:

You can also right-click on the header bar for the message and just to expand it.

No, i can not. Neither in top-bottom layout nor in left-right one.

Originally posted by the-Arioch:

i believe u did not customized headers in earlier Opera releases.It seems okay for some headers, and missing for others.

I see what the problem is. Each header line has certain width, height and padding. You have to make sure you right-click outside that area (tiny spot between headers). Right-cilcking on the left of the headers makes it a lot easier.

Originally posted by the-Arioch:

BTW, the fact that opera switched to side-by-side layout by default on upgrade is also either bug or most probably negligence.

I assumed it's intentional for discoverability purposes, at the risk of changing customize settings.

Polite way to do it would to pop-up dialog with two or three preview buttons and "never show again" checkbox, so user cqn quickly select his option and go on.
Currently it is "find settings to make it back, would you be able to?" quest. Yes, the settings is not deep withing, but still may be a problem to less computer-savvy person (which maybe even does not have idea if there is such setting at all). And two wrench buttons one near another make it harder to communicate it by phone or on forum too.

> Each header line has certain width, height and padding
I begin to think it is not about padding, but about the headers type.

1) Customize menu is seemingly reachable left from every header. Good.
2) it is not reachable upon any of header titles. Bad.
3.1) headers like From and To has special treatment. If u L-click on them you have that special menu "copy contact, e-mail to contact, save contact, etc". And on R-click u have one more special menu "Customize headers". But you can not select the text by dragging mouse there.
3.2) other headers like "Reply-To" while having the very same intension (store addressee e-mail) are excluded from that special treatment. You can select text, but you don't have "contacts" menu at left click upon them. And - maybe just co-incidence, maybe not - u don't have that mail-specific r-click "headers" menu either.


PS: in 11.52 i could copy text if almost all headers at once, just by selecting and copying them. It was convenient when i referred some mail in my internal notes or in forum, etc. In 11.60 i can neither select and copy several headers at once, nor even copy header title, only header value. Inconsistent and inconvenient :-( If headers are "work in progress" then that work went away from the road :-(

agreed that there are several problems with the new mail window, particularly on small screens (1280x800 laptop)

the wasted space from the no-longer-scroll-with-the-message headers bar takes up ~1/4 of the available vertical space in the message part of the window (list above, 4 messages high), meaning that (eg) images that used to fit now must be scrolled. The new fancy fixed-width crap is just as annoying, but at least it can be turned off. As far as i can see, the new non-movable headers can't be changed, except by turning off all headers entirely.

the text in said headers no longer being easily copy-pastable as one block is also a bad thing.

Originally posted by burnout426:

Originally posted by the-Arioch:

BTW, the fact that opera switched to side-by-side layout by default on upgrade is also either bug or most probably negligence.

I assumed it's intentional for discoverability purposes, at the risk of changing customize settings.

To be clear, what Opera did was change the default layout to "list and message on right". In previous versions of Opera, if you just accepted the default layout of "list and message below", on upgrade, it'd change because the default is different. However, if you had changed to a non-default layout like "list only" or to "list only" or "list and message on right" and back to "list and message below", on upgrade, it'd stay to where you had it.

In short, most settings in Opera have two states:

* Default state - user has accepted the default. The setting is not present in operaprefs.ini.

* User modified state - user changed from the default. The setting is written to operaprefs.ini with its value set to what it was changed to.

So, in this case, if "Mail view mode" isn't present in operaprefs.ini, it means you are using the default and never changed it. Before 11.60, that default was "list and message below". Then, when you upgrade to 11.60 in this case, you just see the new default. In 11.52, if you instead had changed the layout so that mail view mode was written to operaprefs.ini, you told Opera that you set it to something specific yourself, which would have been honored on upgrade to 11.60.

Opera's been using this method to upgrade defaults while honoring user-modified settings for a while now. So, Opera did really great in handling this imo.

As another example, if you're using the default location for the mail folder, "Mail Root Directory" shouldn't be in operaprefs.ini. If it's there, it means that it was changed (tcould be the same path as the default even). In this case, if you want Opera to use the default, you'd remove "Mail root directory" from operaprefs.ini while Opera is closed.