michael-mccracken.net (thunderbird-3)

Handling Reference Emails

Michael McCracken — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 16:44:00 GMT

Sometimes you need to refer to your email. (I've written about this before).

Maybe it's to integrate comments from a bunch of people while you're editing a report, or it's a set of mails with instructions for something, like how to configure & install a source code package or submit expense reports in the new system. These emails could all be in one thread, but just as often it's a few mails spread throughout several threads and scattered in time.

A good mail client should make it easy to keep arbitrary groups of messages visible for reference. Since they're reference emails, you're just reading them, and the display shouldn't really be more than the text of the mail. You should be able to fit a few of these on screen without overlapping what you're actually working on, and you don't need a big toolbar with a bunch of actions that won't be happening.

When I'm doing something in another app, I want to arrange my reference mails in an empty part of the screen, then not click back over to the mail client until I'm ready to close them. The faster it is to set up this display and get on with things, the better.

Let's look at how a few existing clients support this kind of thing:

Gmail

It's easy to open a conversation and refer to it, and you can hide the body of messages that aren't relevant. But you can't move things around, so if it's a really long thread, you might be in for some scrolling. If you want to refer to more than one thread, you will have to open each in its own window.

Apple Mail

Because of its lack of a conversation-style thread view, the way to do this is to just open separate windows for each message. You can't look at a single thread in one window - have to open N windows for N messages. Ugh.

Since Mail is what I use most often, when I have this problem I always end up with a flock of windows, and lots of clicking, scrolling and cmd-tabbing around to see what I need, followed by looking at all my open windows and trying not to close any unrelated drafts or accidentally send or delete something important.

Postbox & Thunderbird

The experience with Postbox is similar to, but a little worse than GMail. In Postbox, there's a thread view where I can hide uninteresting messages like GMail, but if I want to pop the thread out into a separate window, I can't - only single messages can be popped into separate windows. I can make tabs with the thread view by double-clicking on a thread, but I can't figure out how to get a new window. Of course, if I need to see multiple emails at once, tabs are no good.

Thunderbird is basically the same, except at least in 3.0.4, the default view when you select a thread is less useful than Postbox's - it looks more like a debug dump of the message's text than a well-designed display.

MailMate

MailMate is similar to Postbox & Thunderbird - except that you get a nice linear conversation-style view with any selection, not just a single thread. (Postbox has a nice view but only for a thread, and TBird shows you any selection but not a nice view.)

Still, as with those others, the linear conversation view can't be popped into its own reading-oriented window, and it's strictly linear.

Summary

I don't think any of the clients I looked at have a good solution for this. Is that a problem? Is this actually important?

I think so. I bet if you think about when you actually look at an email, it's usually one of three times - when you first read it, as you write a reply to it, and when you're searching for it later. In both of the second two cases, I've found that I often have more than one mail or thread that I want to look at while I write or do something in another app, and a dedicated view to support that would be great. I could search through just those messages. I could minimize or move them all at once. Just think of the possibilities!

Finally, if it's easy to keep this set of emails around for later reference without cluttering up my screen in the meantime - and without actually moving the messages into some separate folder on my server - that'd be really great. Because you always have another expense report to file, and really, who wants to memorize that procedure?

Thanks for reading this far, and please feel free to leave a comment - am I missing something great in one of these clients?

Filters: Thunderbird 3

Michael McCracken — Fri, 28 May 2010 13:00:00 GMT

How well does Thunderbird 3 let me create filters to handle heavy traffic lists?

There's not much support for using a message to build a filter from, which I think is the most natural workflow. The menu item "Tools > Message Filters…" opens a dialog box that could use some simplification. For example, the buttons to move filters up and down in order are unnecessary - you should be able to just drag the filters around in the table. There are plenty of other non-mac-like UI elements here. Another example of overcomplicated UI is the "Filter Log" button. At best this is an "advanced" preference, but it's a big button at the top - and it's misnamed. It opens a sheet to let you turn the logging on, but who knows how you actually view the logging?

There are some other UI problems when trying to add the filter - I didn't think ahead of time that I'd need to create the folder to send the filtered messages to. The Message Filters dialog seems modal, because the menubar goes away when it's in focus, but it's not really - so I just created the new folder back on the main window while the new-filter sheet was still open. A little strange, but it worked.

It's also lacking a way to do a dry-run of the filter- to test which messages will match, before just letting it loose on your mailbox. This is a really important feature, especially when filters can do destructive or un-recoverable things like running a script (not in Thunderbird, but present in other mailers) or send a response.

Unread counts

Michael McCracken — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 17:11:00 GMT

One common misguided feature of mail clients is putting an attention-grabbing red badge somewhere showing the count of unread messages in your inbox (or some other folder). It's worst if it's on the dock badge and you don't hide the dock - then there's no way short of quitting the app to completely avoid this visual interruption. Sure you can just ignore it, but why should you have to?

A quick survey of the three main mail clients I've been using shows that they all have some way of putting unread counts in your line of sight, and only Apple Mail (I use v 3.6 on OS X 10.5) really lets you shut it up - you can tell it not to badge the dock at all. If you had a subset of mail that really does need to interrupt you, you can also restrict the unread count to a particular smart mailbox.

The smart mailbox feature is interesting. It's hard to imagine what kind of email is just important enough to show the unread count for, but not important enough for a more obvious alert. I'm sure the feature comes from a different viewpoint on mail - perhaps the idea is that you'll never read all your messages, so you want to see a count of how many "important" ones you need to read. I think that's just treating a symptom, though, honestly.

On the other end of the scale, Thunderbird 3 has no way that I can find to turn off the dock badge:

They do give you a way to make it more annoying, though - you can have the dock icon bounce for every new mail! I can't think of any good reason for that, except that at some point when the dock was new, it was fun to make things bounce.

Finally, GMail - I take my GMail more or less straight-up, in a dedicated browser app with no extra frills, that I wrote in 2006 (see post here ). I understand that apps like Mailplane add some nice desktop integration, and multiple account support, but I don't really need that stuff. So, assuming a basic straight-up GMail, it has no dock badge, but it does show an unread count in the title bar:

While that'll show up in some menus and on mouse-over in Exposé, it's really not a big deal. I'd say that GMail (in the browser) and Apple Mail are about the same in terms of visual distraction, once you change the prefs in Mail.

I'd prefer that an email app didn't do anything to make all unread messages look like something important you need to fix. If I'm going to check the mail, I'll notice the messages. If I'm not about to check the mail, I don't want to know. I think this is best for everyone, too - like the insistence on filing vs. searching, it's an outdated habit from a time when email volumes were lower.

Either a message is important enough for a major interruption - a pop-up window with a beep, for instance - or it's OK to let it sit for a while. The unread status alone is a poor substitute for "important", and we should move past it.

HTML mail is here to stay, so a client needs to handle it well. Since images in HTML mail are securi

Michael McCracken — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:00:00 GMT

HTML mail is here to stay, so a client needs to handle it well. Since images in HTML mail are security problems, a good client won't load them until you say so - and should also let you white-list some senders.

GMail does this well enough, with two links - one to show the images in a message once, and another to whitelist the sender. I'd say that's about the best you can ask for. If you want to remove a sender from the whitelist, it's a little obscure - you have to find an email from them and there's a link in the details that says "Don't display from now on."

One interesting thing is that this is a separate list of addresses from your Contacts (which in GMail, includes every address in every email by default).

Thunderbird starts off with basically the same interface as GMail. They show a big loud bar that alerts you to the missing images, as if you couldn't tell. You can press a button to load it once, or click a link (why not another button?) to whitelist the sender.

This is where we go a little haywire, though - all I want to do is whitelist the sender for images, but Thunderbird throws up a sheet asking me for all kinds of contact info - now the sending email is in my address book. So I end up with a bunch of noreply addresses in a group in my address book called "Personal Address Book." Thanks?

I think a whitelist just for image display that's separate from the address book is the way to go - it seems more natural. An address book seems like something I should control manually. Ideally, in a desktop mail client on OS X, the client's address book is just the system's Address Book DB - so that other apps can use the info. And since that's system-wide data, you really don't want a client just dumping everything in there.

Let's start things off with a key-shortcut gripe from Thunderbird 3.

Michael McCracken — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:14:00 GMT

Let's start things off with a key-shortcut gripe from Thunderbird 3. "Forward" is ⌘-L. Not ⌘-F (that's find-in-message, which is pretty common, if rarely used) or even ⌘-⇧-F, like it is in Mail. ⌘-⇧-F in Thunderbird brings up this bad boy:

We can talk more about search later, but for for the sake of the keyboard shortcut discussion, why not start with the nice search field in the toolbar? Google has taught us that a single text field is how we should do search, and we almost never need to fill out a big form to search for things.

Another thing the web has taught us is that ⌘-L is basically "go to the command line". It's so hardwired at this point that using that shortcut for anything other than a generalized command interface seems like a missed opportunity.