1419234 - Better presenting attachments in message pane to make existence of attachment more obvious

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, enhancement)

Description

[Frank]

Attachment: Notification bar styling in Nautilus (modified by Adapta theme)

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
Build ID: 20171113102334

Steps to reproduce:

I received mails with attachments.


Actual results:

It’s easy to overlook attached attachments.


Expected results:

Would be cool if the existence of attachments could be presented more striking. E.g. by a column with a symbol for mails with attachments in the mail overview.

Even in open mails, it’s easy to overlook the bar at the bottom, which shows the attachments. I think it’s better to either display attachments in either some sort of side bar (like it’s done when composing a mail), or setting this bar to the top. Maybe also with a yellow background, like it’s done in Gnome Nautilus for pointing out specific information (see attached screen shot).

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

your screen shot is off

Comment 2

[Frank]

Why should it be?

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

it has nothing to do with your description of "existence of attachments could be presented more striking. E.g. by a column with a symbol for mails with attachments in the mail overview."

Comment 4

[Frank]

It’s an example for a yellow info bar, pointing out information better then a shallow bar down at the bottom of a window, which gets overseen quickly. This is because since I use TB, I overlooked attachments frequently. This has never ever happend with Geary or this goddamn MS Office.

Comment 5

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

I think the screenshot shows a sample "info bar", which the reporter suggests implementing for TB. Currently the attachments are shown at the bottom of the e-mail in the attachments area.

Comment 6

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

(In reply to Frank from comment #0)
> Would be cool if the existence of attachments could be presented more
> striking. E.g. by a column with a symbol for mails with attachments in the
> mail overview.

This exists already. Right click on the tree header and tick "Attachments". Then you see if a message has attachments in the list.

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Frank from comment #0)
> Actual results:
> It’s easy to overlook attached attachments.

Frank, thanks for sharing your ideas for improved visibility of attachments on received messages.
Can you please try the following:
- right-click on attachment header bar
- check "Initially show attachment pane"
- look at other messages with attachments

This setting will always keep the attachment pane fully displayed, showing all attachments when you open any message. I think this increases attachment visibility quite a lot and with that setting it'll be much harder to overlook attachments. What do you think?

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(I found no duplicates for this)

Comment 9

[Frank]

Sorry for the delay and thanks for your responses!

• Tree header – attachments: That helps just in case you’re inspecting the overview. You most likely won’t look at this part of the window when you’re reading a mail, but still thanks, I activated this!

• Attachment pane: Yes, this makes it a little bit better (I’ve tested this the last weeks). But I still think this could be improved.

Just for explaining my issue here: When I’m at work and have lots of things to do, I sometimes just take a short glimpse at my mails (and I think this applies for a lot of people). So my proposal was to highlight attachments more graphicly. Then I recalled the yellow notification bars in Nautilus (whit I attached) and thought that some color would indeed help. Since I encountered your design survey, maybe this would be a topic for discussion with Monterail? I also like the way Geary shows up attachments via their system file icons! I’ll attach a screen shot of Geary attachments, too, for you to see.

Comment 10

[Frank]

Attachment: Attachments in Geary

Comment 11

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

With setting "mailnews.attachments.display.view" to 1 or 2 you can make the icons bigger and position the text below the icons.

Would this help to make the attachments better visible?

Comment 12

[Frank]

Ah, "1" is nice! Mind setting that as default? ;)

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

done ?

Comment 14

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Yeah, this seems outdated.