Antun Karlovac Reporter
	Description • 19 years ago

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7

Thunderbird's compose window is not laid out like most other mail clients: Thunderbird has an infinite number of fields that can be "To", "Cc" or "Bcc". The accepted norm is one "To" field, one "Cc" field and one "Bcc" field. This is true of both client applications (Outlook, Outlook Express, Pine, Apple Mail, Eudora), as well as for web based email applications (Yahoo! Mail, GMail, Hotmail, Laszlo Mail).

This leads to the following problems:

1. Composing an email without using the mouse. You enter an email address in the "To:" field, and then you have to move your hands from their normal position over the keyboard down to the arrows to move the cursor down in order to get to the next "To:" field. Now to change this to a "Cc:" field, you have to use the shift+tab to get back to it, then move through the list of options in the pull-down list using the arrow keys. This is very unnatural; in all other software applications I know, the Tab key moves me to the next field that I can see.

2. Resending a sent email to new recipients. I often have to send an email that I've sent out to a new group of people. So from the sent items menu, I select "Edit as New", and then I have to manually delete each and every recipient, from each "line" at a time. If there's 20 recipients in an email, this is impractical. In all other mail clients, all recipients are in a single comma-separated (or semicolon-separated) field. That way, you can highlight an entire "To:" field and delete all the previous recipients.

3. Seeing all the recipients in a message. If there's a lot of recipients in a list, you have to scroll through the Compose window. 

Suggested fixes:

- Change the layout for the compose message to have three fields: To, Cc and Bcc.
- Allow the user to switch between two Compose window layouts (e.g. "Thunderbird Classic" and "Simple layout".

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

	zug_treno
	Comment 1 • 19 years ago

(In reply to comment #0)
> 2. Resending a sent email to new recipients. I often have to send an email that
> I've sent out to a new group of people. So from the sent items menu, I select
> "Edit as New", and then I have to manually delete each and every recipient,
> from each "line" at a time. If there's 20 recipients in an email, this is
> impractical.

Related to bug 252665 (and maybe bug 257921)?

	Mike Cowperthwaite
	Comment 2 • 19 years ago

(In reply to comment #0)
> 1. Composing an email without using the mouse. You enter an email address in
> the "To:" field, and then you have to move your hands from their normal
> position over the keyboard down to the arrows to move the cursor down in order
> to get to the next "To:" field. 

First of all, the up- and down-arrow navigation of the address fields is 
broken; there are some situation where they work, others where they don't 
(bug 244512).  Second, when you type the first address, if you type <enter> immediately after, focus moves to the next (empty) address field (whereas if 
you type <tab>, focus moves to the Subject).  

IMO, having to "move your hands ... to the arrows" is not a compelling reason 
to change, altho having to move your hand to the mouse would be.  Computer keyboards have arrows and many, many programs use them.


> Now to change this to a "Cc:" field, you have to use 
> the shift+tab to get back to it, then move through the list of options
> in the pull-down list using the arrow keys. 

With curent builds (1.5, 1.6), this procedure is not entirely necessary.  Yes, you need to <shift-tab> to move the focus, but then you can type C (or B) to change the header to CC: or BCC:, and then <tab> back.  

And (even in 1.0.x) when you type <enter> after an address, the next address field is automatically initialized as the same label (To, CC, BCC) as the one you just typed.


> 2. I often have to send an email that I've sent out to a new group [...]

This is an annoyance, and the bugs mentioned in comment 1 address this.


> 3. Seeing all the recipients in a message. If there's a lot of recipients in a
> list, you have to scroll through the Compose window. 

The panel containing the address fields & subject is resizeable -- it's separated from the compose window by a moveable splitter.


> Suggested fixes:
> 
> - Change the layout for the compose message to have three fields: To, Cc
> and Bcc.

I doubt anyone is going to put the effort into redesigning the compose window according to your desires.  If you prefer that style of interface, why not simply use the program that provides it?  It's a waste of everyone's time to make every program look exactly like every other program.

It would be possible for you, or someone knowledgeable whom you could convince/pay to do it for you, to write an extension to TB to make the compose window appear and behave the way you want.


> - Allow the user to switch between two Compose window layouts (e.g.
> "Thunderbird Classic" and "Simple layout".

This definitely will not happen.

	Antun Karlovac Reporter
	Comment 3 • 19 years ago

Mike - thank you for your response.

> With curent builds (1.5, 1.6), this procedure is not entirely necessary.  Yes,
> you need to <shift-tab> to move the focus, but then you can type C (or B) to
> change the header to CC: or BCC:, and then <tab> back.  

The build I'm using build does this too. The point I'm making is that GUI convention is that the tab key moves me to the next focusable field; I don't know of any other applications that you have to use a combination of tab and enter keys to move through a list of focusable fields. If Enter moves me from the "To" field to the "Subject" one, then surely Shift+Enter ought to move me back up the list? 

The reason I took the time to file this is that writing an email is one of the most common things I do on my computer, so the number of keystrokes it takes to get to composing and sending it is really critical. I'm not asking for Thunderbird to be like other email packages in all respects; it's about making it as streamlined as possible for the tasks the user performs most frequently, and the compose window just happens to be one of them. 

> It would be possible for you, or someone knowledgeable whom you could
> convince/pay to do it for you, to write an extension to TB to make the compose
> window appear and behave the way you want.

How hard of a job is this? I'd be happy to invest the time to learn how to write a UI extension for Thunderbird - is there a skillset you can recommend for this particular task, and maybe a starting point you can point me to?

Thanks,

Antun

	Mike Cowperthwaite
	Comment 4 • 19 years ago

(In reply to comment #3)
> > It would be possible for you[...] to write an extension to TB to make the
> > compose window appear and behave the way you want.
> 
> How hard of a job is this? I'd be happy to invest the time to learn how to
> write a UI extension for Thunderbird - is there a skillset you can recommend
> for this particular task, and maybe a starting point you can point me to?

It's not exactly trivial, but you probably have most of the source code you 
need already, zipped up in the various JAR files -- .XUL to define the window structure, .CSS to define the window appearance, and .JS (JavaScript) to 
perform the necessary actions.  Start here:
  http://developer.mozilla.org/

	Michael Phenow
	Comment 5 • 19 years ago

I would like to chime in with my support of Antun's suggestion to improve the compose window's address fields.  Composing and email to multiple recipients is a task that is performed all day long and needs to be brain-dead simple.  The current implementation is clunky and non-intuitive.  UIs ought to follow established convention unless there is very good reason to deviate and the alternative design works very well.  I've never used an interface that behaves this way and it doesn't work very well.

"IMO, having to "move your hands ... to the arrows" is not a compelling reason 
to change, altho having to move your hand to the mouse would be.  Computer
keyboards have arrows and many, many programs use them."

Here I believe you're mistaken.  Moving your hands to the arrows to perform one of the simplest and most-often-performed tasks is not acceptable design.  Certainly this is not vi and not all actions can be performed with your hands always in the same position, but I think closer inspection of the important use-cases is in order.

"I doubt anyone is going to put the effort into redesigning the compose window
according to your desires.  If you prefer that style of interface, why not
simply use the program that provides it?  It's a waste of everyone's time to
make every program look exactly like every other program."

Honestly, and I don't mean to be rude myself, but this is unprofessional and unproductive.  His request was thoughtful, well-presented, and completely reasonable.  There's no need to blow it off like that.  Thoughtful input from the community is what makes software like Thunderbird what it is.  It is not a matter of making every program look like every other program.  Deviations from established conventions need to be very deliberate and carefully considered.  Telling him to "simply use the program that provides it" is just silly.  Clearly Antun is a savvy user who has considered a number of email clients and chosen the one that best suits his needs.  The fact that he has a good suggestion for an improvement to Thunderbird doesn't mean that there's necessarily any better client available.

	Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)
	Comment 6 • 18 years ago

> 2. Resending a sent email to new recipients. I often have to send an email that
> I've sent out to a new group of people. So from the sent items menu, I select
> "Edit as New", and then I have to manually delete each and every recipient,
> from each "line" at a time. If there's 20 recipients in an email, this is
> impractical. In all other mail clients, all recipients are in a single
> comma-separated (or semicolon-separated) field. That way, you can highlight an
> entire "To:" field and delete all the previous recipients.

bug 252665 and bug 347770

 
> 3. Seeing all the recipients in a message. If there's a lot of recipients in a
> list, you have to scroll through the Compose window. 

addressed in comment 2. And it wouldn't surprise me if you searched bugzilla and found an existing bug on this topic.


In reviewing this, for me the biggest UI problem is no visual indication when the "To:" drop down is focused.