How Mail.app sucks horizontally
The poster at Aaron’s UI Design Blog is seriously steamed up 
about Mail’s inability to display email in a “wide-screen” format with an Outlook-like preview pane.
Lifting a quotation from an Ars Technica review of Tiger, he thinks that Mail.app’s inability to do this is characteristic of an email client that is “hideously ugly,” and “inflexible, inconsistent, and again, a little strange.”
If Mail did provide those options, he says, “I would be able to see many more email headers than I can now, and provide myself with a more enjoyable reading experience.”
He creates a mock-up of a wide-screen view and takes the opportunity to serve out the Apple Mail Team for “Mail’s overdesigned UI”.
Who knows?
At one stage the Apple Mail Team was thinking about an Outlook-like wide-screen view, but there is no sign of a native implementation in the Leopard Mail previews.
In the meantime, of course, Aaron needs to get hold of Aaron Harnly’s excellent Letterbox plugin , which does exactly what he wants. (These are two different Aarons, I think.)
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November 25th, 2006 at 1:49 am
I really cant agree with all that horizontal / vertical stuff.
I tried letterbox only to find out, that it disturbs my way of organizing my mails because I cant see only half of the additional information like unread-status, Project, Sender, Topic, mailbox, date and so on.
So if one wants the oulook-like layout, letterbox does a great job;
for me the original Mail.app layout is exactly what i need and like.
Greetings from Germany
November 25th, 2006 at 2:51 am
Meh. I think the 3 column format is fugly and all of his complaints are mostly customizable like the icon size. I like Mail’s current layout. The emails I receive aren’t 2 page novels so the layout works for me. I resize the top pane to allow more reading space of the email. I just show 10 emails at a time in the inbox and even then, I use a smart mailbox to see my unread mail. Sounds like sour grapes to me. The third column just doesn’t feel right to me. I’ve never had the “pleasure” of using Outlook but I love Mail.
November 25th, 2006 at 5:46 am
Aaron says that Mail has “a horizontal orientation reminiscent of the worst aspects of Microsoft Outlook Express.” But it’s also reminiscent of PowerMail, Mailsmith, Gyazmail, GNUMail, the default view of Entourage (until recently the only view ), and many non-mail apps like Yojimbo, DevonThink Pro, Journler, and so on. In other words, it’s probably the most common UI in Mac software. if you don’t like it, fine, but why blame Mail for it?
November 25th, 2006 at 6:08 am
Thanks for the tip regarding Letterbox, I just downloaded it and am playing around with it now. It definitely helps, and I have to give mad props to Mr. Harnly for this.
Cheers,
Aaron
November 25th, 2006 at 7:47 am
My view is that the majority of mail clients are just copies of each other in their presentation layer. And thats the way its been for the last 5 - 6 years or so. Mail, regardless of email client, is probably the 2nd most used application at home, a browser gets probably the most use there, and it’s up there at work as well.
Surely there is someone out there who can develop an email client application and do something great, different and better with the presentation layer rather than the hackneyed interface we are so used to. (See Ayjay’s comment above)
Just as Apple has done something innovative with Backup for Leopard, with the presentation layer use Core Graphics / Animation (and I’m not saying its better only that its innovative), I’d like to see a company have a go at using these newer features of an OS to build a really classy email client, that presents info in a completly new paradigm thats interesting, efficient and easily comprehended - and customisable / extensible.
I am so sick of email lists.
November 25th, 2006 at 8:18 am
I can’t stand the outlook-like preview pane. At work we use outlook and it’s the first thing that everybody changes. I think all the people at my work (that have enough of a clue to realize it can be changed) have changed it back to the method that Mail uses. With the Mac OS X Mail method, you can see more information about each email in the list and you can see all your mailboxes quite well. In the screenshot provided at the UI blog, you can’t even read the mailbox names, and there is very little information about the message provided in the list of emails.
November 25th, 2006 at 10:00 am
How about an email cloud? All you see in the window are the names of your correspondents. The bigger the name, the more recent the email. Quantity of email is shown by colour. Click/Return on a name goes to a subject and date list (or however you customise). Throw in Time Machine to taper off older entries.
November 25th, 2006 at 8:36 pm
I love Aaron Harnly’s letterbox plug-in - I’ve got a wide screen monitor, so it makes great use of the space and lets me have a good chance of seeing the whole e-mail in the preview pane.
I’d like to see it as an option in Leopard’s version of Mail - because it does need the space of a wider screen - and for some people the existing layour will work better.
The one thing that (for me) is better in Outlook’s implementation is that it uses two lines to show the message details, dealing with some of the criticisms that you can’t see the message detail. I dislike Outlook in general though - particularly its layers of options that make the slightest change a game of hunting through screens of preferences trying to find the one you want. Entourage is a much better implementation of a mail client - but the need to constantly sync with iCal and Address Book (which everything else uses) is a pain.
I’d completely agree with MacPomme - I’d love to see Apple innovate with something like Mail and give us at least the option of something different from the generic mail application layout.
November 27th, 2006 at 2:17 am
Mail isn’t such a GUI horror. But as others have said, Apple could do BETTER.
I tried the Letterbox plug-in. It works well. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be a way to toggle it on and off. I ended up uninstalling it.
I prefer to open email in a separate window, like Outlook Express or Cyberdog. I DO wish that in that mode there were Forward and Back buttons (with Command Key equivalents, too!), so I could easily navigate between messages.
December 2nd, 2006 at 2:19 am
One feature I REALLY wish email packages had, universally, is attachments stored in a file folder, with hot links to the email message - a feature Eudora has had for years.
Email should be managed in email - files managed in the file system…. period.
Eudora’s additional group capability, where attachments sent to internal users, points them to a shared directory and file, is a major bandwidth saver.
This seperate of email and attachments would radically improve file configuration management issues as well, and radically reduce the size of email folders.
If Eudora had a cleaner interface to handle multiple accounts (I have 7), then I might consider changing. At least Eudora makes use of the system features, like address book, so I don’t have to maintain 700 names in 2 places, like most other email packages.
There is just not one mail package that does everything well. Mail.app does a good, albeit limited, job, and is fine for most purposes. Just wish it handled attachments better.
December 2nd, 2006 at 9:28 am
You’re spot on Kirk with “Email should be managed in email - files managed in the file system”. It’s always struck me as bizarre that there’s this one exception. I used First Class years ago when it was a BBS and it was impressively intelligent regarding data efficiency.