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Real conversation view
The gather feature is nice, but what i miss is a "real" conversation view with all sent and received mails - just like Gmail. I guess, it could be done with a saved search (doesn't work for me, because the window content is blank) and should be placed right above the Inbox and not somewhere as a smart folder.
Get that and a few other things right and i would gladly pay for the app.
Get that and a few other things right and i would gladly pay for the app.
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The best point from the company
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Thanks for all of the terrific feedback on conversation views, it's obviously a topic that people care a great deal about. So I wanted to let everyone know that we're thinking about this, and while we have some great ideas on our white board, we want to make sure we're thinking through all of the issues thoroughly so that we that we can crush this thing.
What this means is that we'll probably need a few more beta releases (we release often) before we can land something new for conversation views. But stick with us, and we'll keep iterating and tuning as we go. In the meantime, please keep the feedback and ideas rolling in.
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The critical thing for me about how Gmail Conversations work is two things:
a) messages are collapsed unless they are unread, or starred
b) messages are in chronological view (not reverse) [I did find a preference for this in the super advanced panel]
I would *really* like to see options for these two things.
Postbox explained above that it views Conversations as a search mode, not a normal way of operation - I think there are enough Gmail people chiming in here that indicate that a lot of people DO use conversations as a normal way of operation. I certainly do. Conversations are also >the< reason I am trying Postbox.
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Right now, I'm really enjoying Postbox. But conversation view is what has me fleeing back to Gmail several times a day. If you've already got the mechanics in place with "Gather", just automate it!
I can see the headline now on tech news sites everywhere: "Finally, A Desktop Email Client With Gmail-style Conversations". You'd make a ton of people very happy.
I’m confident
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After all this discussion, I think it's fair to say, that a full gmail-style conversation view is something that would be a purchase feature for a lot of us (And I'm speaking as someone who had an up-to-date paid license to Eudora between 94 and 06).
So adding this as maybe a preference would probably be good. This way you simply switch between "conversation view" and classic folders & thread view.
And as for why I'm not simply using any of the gmail clients like mailplane: I don't actually want google to have my mail, I'd rather have it on my own server/desktop and under my own control. That's why I'm looking for a desktop client. It's just that gmails mailhandling is so superior for me with my few hundred mails a day that I sacrifice privacy for being able to cope.
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I currently use a Fluid.app browser for Gmail. I've tried multiple desktop clients for the seamless integration with the OS, but I always return to using Gmail for the conversation view. It's way more efficient than any other way of displaying messages. Instead of going back and forth between folders and scrolling down long lists of emails, everything is right there for you. While Postbox has the "Gather" feature, the extra step is a hassle (and it doesn't group enough of my emails). If Postbox wants to be a strong competitor in the email client market they need to work on better implementation of this.
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The 'Gather' button is found at the top right of the message header pane.
Actually, no, it isn't.
And a desktop incarnation of gmail would be the thing I'm looking for. Gmail is currently the best way to interact with mail. And the conversation view is a large part of that.
Actually I'd like to also be able to reverse the sorting in the conversation view. I usually read from top to bottom, and I like my mail the same way.
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I won't switch to another desktop email client until it supports full conversation threading like Gmail. I was hoping Postbox would, but it doesn't appear to. It looks great and promising, but I can't part with Gmail without that feature.
I’m disappointed.
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Due to volume, only the 15 most recent replies are being displayed
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Inappropriate?@Jeff
Hopefully they don't try to accommodate everyone. If they do that they will just be another half-baked email client that has a lot of good ideas that doesn't quite pan out. They need to figure out what sets them apart and focus on it.
Some of us will likely leave if that happens. others will adapt. But in the end they will have an extremely well thought out, solid, product that sets itself apart from other email clients.
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Totally agree. -
Inappropriate?Just had an idea about this topic. I think this addresses MOST of the issues above.
1) I like the way it works now. Traditional view default. Click the gather button, and you get the gathered messages.
2) I like the idea of having a "list" view where you can see all the 'gathered' messages as described by @eimermusic above ... but i DO NOT like that idea in the traditional view.
What if after you clicked gather, there was a window pane at the top that has a "list view" for that conversation. It would look just like the list view now, but it would have a up/down arrow in the border between the list pane and text view of the conversation (where the messages actually are).
Clicking the arrows would expand or hide the list view ...
I don't particularly care if seeing the list or hiding the list is the default (seeing the list by default makes more sense to me).
Clicking on something in the list scrolls you to that individual message.
Going into the "gather view" for a conversation marks that whole conversation as read.
Working from the traditional list, clicking on a conversation should expand that list, not marking ANYTHING as read. the user can then go to individual emails which would then mark those emails as read. When a user clicks on an individual email it displays in the preview panel just like it does now.
However, when a user clicks on the thread (which would expand it, as described above) the preview panel should so the same thing as clicking on the gather button would ... that is, the whole conversation.
This way, the conversation oriented people can see their "gathered" view by default ... but it doesn't mark any mail as read which is driving others of us crazy. Plus it still gives us all the functionality of the gather view when we click on the gather button, PLUS it gives us additional functionality to more easily move around the gathered view and work with the messages there, plus it keeps the traditional email view intact.
Wow. i just totally solved this problem :)3 Comments Add a comment
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No, requiring the user to click 'gather' to get the advantages of conversation view is not a solution. Say I have 2-3 thousand conversations. You want me to click 'gather' on each one before I can view it as a cohesive unit? I could set up gmail to import my IMAP account and get those advantages instantly. Postbox should *definitely* at least have the option to gather automatically, and gathering should work better than it does.
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if you were to tell me that you had to view those 2 to 3 thousand conversations everyday, you might have a point. But how often, REALLY, do you have to view an entire thread to know whats going on?
I have horrible short term memory,and even I can remember the gist of all the threads I deal with on a daily basis (usually 10 or 15 a day) ...
The times that i have found gathering the messages most useful are after a weekend break, or if i moved away from a project when something higher priority came up, etc ... Not one one that i'm dealing with all day long, or for several days in a row. -
I just don't see the point of adding another step (explicitly pressing the Gather button) to every conversation I'll ever deal with. I'll never want a conversation *not* "gathered", ever. To me the concept of a gather button seems like adding a "open the envelope" button that you have to explicitly click for every message you're interested in.
And while we're at it, how about a "just a snippet" button that you have to click to get a preview of the messge, something akin to only opening the envelope a little bit. Sure, it's no big deal. It's only one more thing that you have to do with every conversation/message. And how often do you actually need to read the message that you're receiving? Often a snippet is good enough, so you'd be providing an extra service with the snippet button. Automatically showing a snippet might be cool for things like gmail, but well-established client software like pine has been successful without features like that and there's no need to confuse the users.
The 1970s called, and they want their email clients back. -
Inappropriate?Ok, I'm coming from nearly 20 years of Eudora (Mac) and I just don't understand the idea behind ''conversation''. Can someone explain it to me. How is this different from ''gather'' ?2 Comments Add a comment
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Here's one explanation:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/an... -
A screenshot may help
http://www.google.com/mail/help/scree... -
Inappropriate?The critical thing for me about how Gmail Conversations work is two things:
a) messages are collapsed unless they are unread, or starred
b) messages are in chronological view (not reverse) [I did find a preference for this in the super advanced panel]
I would *really* like to see options for these two things.
Postbox explained above that it views Conversations as a search mode, not a normal way of operation - I think there are enough Gmail people chiming in here that indicate that a lot of people DO use conversations as a normal way of operation. I certainly do. Conversations are also >the< reason I am trying Postbox.
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@Sue
Thank you for so clearly articulating what I and I'm sure others have been trying to say. -
Gmail isn't an option for everyone (corporate email, people who run their own servers), but the conversation mode is ideal for handling large volumes of email without losing track of everything. Sup (http://sup.rubyforge.org/) came close, but it played fast and loose with IMAP and didn't have a GUI, so I'm extremely hopeful for Postbox.
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It may not be THE reason for some (it definitely is for me), but I think Gmail is pushing the envelope in things email related, so mimicking their features with a client would surely be widely appreciated.
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Inappropriate?very disappointed with the changes here.
Gather button is gone.
Conversations, when viewed, mark all the messages as read.
Marking conversations as read, IMO, breaks postbox. How do you leave mail in a conversation unread so that in other mail clients (like on the iphone), its still viewed as unread if you accidently hit a conversation and 20 unread messages are suddenly read in a thread that is 100 messages long.
How do you gather threads to a new tab now? that was insanely useful.
In practice, i can't use postbox until the mark conversations as read thing is addressed. i have too many threads where accidentally marking everything as read would be devastating to my work flow on certain projects.
I’m frustrated
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I can think of a simple fix for the 'marking whole thread as read'
I would add a second countdown to the settings, similar to the one which specifies the duration the message has to remain open for Postbox to mark is as read.
The second countdown would be much longer and specify the duration that you would need the whole thread open, for it all to count as read. Cause if say you read the thread and it's open for 30 seconds, then it's safe (or safer) to assume you've read all the individual messages. A step further down that line could be a multiplier effect, so if there are 3 messages in the thread, i need 30 seconds, if 10, I would need a 100 etc.
I feel your pain but I'm afraid there is no perfect way to solve this. I often click on the whole thread and read through the message on the right and voila I'm done, next message (next thread). Only to remember seconds later that I have to go back and unfold the whole thread and individually click each of the messages to mark each as read. Slightly tedious, which is the opposite end of what you're saying with the mark-all-as-read problem.. -
I just don't see adding a "timer" as a way to fix the problem. What if i hit delete on a message, it selected the next message (which happens to be a thread). I then get distracted for 10 minutes and when i come back all my messages are marked as read.
Right now I am being EXTREMELY careful about how i delete my mail and move around to avoid this problem.
I shouldn't have to spend time "being careful" to not accidentally set messages as "read" ... they should only be marked as read if i actually read them.
Maybe one solution would be to NOT select the next message automatically. After hitting delete it doesn't select anything and the user has to hit the down arrow key or click on the next message. I'm not sure that makes sense though.
Just adding an option to the preference panel to "mark thread as read on select" would do it.
That option could be right above "Sort thread with newest/oldest first"
Which could be right above "Show all opens to new tab"
Anyway you look at it, i think conversation views will need a preference panel all to themselves. -
As I mentioned in another sub-thread, there's no single right way to do this because everyone is wired differently. @rado expresses this perfectly. We're more concerned about nailing the default behavior for novices, other behaviors can be tuned by exposing preferences to advanced users.
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No single right way besides Gmail's implementation :). I gave up hopes on Postbox and reverted to Gmail. It's offline support gives me no reason to use anything else.
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Can't argue with that logic.
If you have an application that does exactly what you want there is no reason to look at other alternatives.
My issue is there are no email clients that work the way I want them too AND work correctly (relatively bug free). I'd be happy with one that works close to the way i want and is relatively bug free. -
Inappropriate?@rado
the simplest would be to throw an option in to the system preferences. "Traditional" or "Conversation" by default. The show all button (previously the gather button) brings it all together for those times that you want it to come all together (which has been very handy for me in the past).
I still think that this, http://getsatisfaction.com/postbox/topics/real_conversation_view#reply_796972, is the best overall solution.1 Comment Add a comment
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@mbond, (btw we should really use the comments to reply to each other, this clutters up the space here.)
A two-mode approach could work too I guess. But such is the case with all problems, two parties rooting for opposing ideas. The beauty of software is that you can make it individual through preferences and thus make everyone happy. Innovation (not compromise) however, is introducing a third way, where both parties are happy with that one thing, together. And that I think is what we should try to arrive at rather than settle for two-mode solutions >just yet< (no disrespect).
My problem with the gather (show all) function, was simply that you had to do the extra step of clicking gather. Don't get me wrong, I love the feature and it's THE reason I'm using Postbox, but I was hoping for an auto-gather feature. One which would include my replies among the incoming messages. Without my replies, the current threading only serves its function in the list pane (left). As soon as I start reading the messages in the right column I'm left to wonder, did I reply and what did I reply, I look back to the left, unroll the list of constituent messages and look for them small curly arrows indicating my feedback, I move my eyes back to the right and click gather to read what I wrote.
The arrows in the list pane are brilliant cause they let me see, IF I've replied or forwarded the given email, which is great. In the list view, all I need is IF, in the right column, I would like to see >what< I replied with.
Regarding the mark-all-as-read problem I've been thinking whether it would be technically possible (from the programming point of view), for Postbox to detect whether the >particular< message has been viewed for the necessary (say) 3 seconds for it to be marked as read. This way, IF you go through the right column and go through the threaded messages one by one, Postbox would mark each message as read, one by one, individually, accordingly.
Additionally I would throw in a little colour-coding to the mix (as well as left, right alignment, or even tab-offsetting of replies like you see in old-style-forums like on imdb (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1706767/bo...)). I've thrown these ideas out there before (http://getsatisfaction.com/postbox/to...), before I found this thread. (speaking of which, it would be nice if people took their time in adding keywords to their posts, so that they're easier to find) (that and people actually using the search to find previously started threads with same problems, I know I try) -
Inappropriate?This has been mentioned before, but i haven't seen it addressed lately.
It seems like people want to use the "conversation view" to read through the thread of messages ... but the messages are sorted in newest first. It makes it hard to read through them like that. Seems like it would be better to have them in chronological order (oldest to newest).
Maybe make them collapsible so that all the old messages are collapsed and only the unread messages are expanded?
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FWIW, I think that Gmail's treatment of conversations / collapsing / ordering / including sent-mail messages / etc. is excellent. Why not use that as a starting point for postbox conversations? *Then* try to improve on the concept.
Just my $0.02. -
FWIW, I think that Gmail's treatment of conversations / collapsing / ordering / including sent-mail messages / etc. is excellent. Why not use that as a starting point for postbox conversations? Indeed, multiple people on this thread (including several of the "best points") have cited Gmail's conversation model as a Good one. Once that is all working nicely in Postbox, *then* perhaps try to improve on the concept.
Just my $0.02. -
Postbox is somewhat different in that the preview pane, if located on the bottom, has limited real estate. So when one clicks on a conversation summary row, they will be met with old message headers instead of the newest content from the conversation. We had the order reversed initially and it resulted in twice as many clicks/scrolls to get up to speed on the status of a conversation.
Since then we've implemented the vertical view for the message pane, and since there's more space there now, a chron view starts to make more sense... for those users who are using vertical view.
At the end of the day, there's no "right" way to do this since everyone is wired differently. The best approach is to pick the default that is least likely to trip novice users up, and to make available a preference that allows advanced users to pick the view that best suits them. -
@sherman
I don't think it should change based on the window layout, that would be confusing (and potentially disastrous for applescripting or automator if those features ever come along).
The way it is now, to someone that isn't familar with conversation views, i find it to be very confusing. I'd rather see all the messages in chronological order, but collapsed, and possible scroll me to the first unread message (which wouldn't be collapsed).
I still see that being problematic, but if not all the messages were marked as read at this point, it would be helpful. -
Inappropriate?I definitely agree with Jeff and mbond on this one. For what we saw, Gmail seems to be a good starting point for handling conversation in Postbox. With all the other useful feature already in it, it would be the best email client out there. -
Inappropriate?Just a thought: why the quotes are, by default, shown? The conversation view doesn't require to see the quoted text by default.
So maybe it would be interesting to hide the quoted text by default. And maybe hide the read messages.
Keep doing your good job, Postbox is already very good and it's not even the version 1! Thank for this.1 Comment Add a comment
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doubleA, we do hide the quotes by default in conversation mode. The one scenario where we show them is when the message body has nested / inline replies. That is, quoted text, followed by reply text followed by quoted text, followed by reply text. That seemed like the one area where it was really confusing in conversation mode because you can't tell what the person is talking about.
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Inappropriate?The conversation view currently implemented is very nice, and its a first for a client.. but I think it can be improved upon very much still.
Currently it unfolds all received mails for that conversation by default making a very big scrolling area while it may not be necessary to see them all. Emulating the way gmail does this would be a very good touch.
I’m sad
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I agree, only unread messages should be unfolded (as said by doubleA too).
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you are wanting the hidden preference: pb.conversation_display.max_open_messages
be warned, it screws some things up in Beta 12. Or was that 11? i can't remember which version i was running now.
Documented here:
http://www.the-forgotten.org/tech/pos... -
Given the name, it doesn't sound exactly right. If there are more messages than max_open_messages, which messages are shown (or supposed to be shown if it was working)? the most recent ones, the unread ones, or what?
I'd like, instead, to have only unread messages open, no matter how many or how few.
edit: I think I made a mess with getsatisfaction and opera ... they don't always work well together apparently -
I edited my above comment to include a link. It does what you want ;-)
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"edit: I think I made a mess with getsatisfaction and opera ... they don't always work well together apparently"
I know this is getting of topic, but what makes you say so? -
@mbond: THANKS!! :) It does almost what I want, if I set it to 0 it shows only unread messages. If I set it to 1 (or any value > 0) instead, it shows the first N messages, while I'd like it to show the *last* N messages. Little things though, and so far seems to work ok on beta 12 ... we'll see.
@MMeester: I clicked "post reply" by mistake instead of "add comment", realized the mistake I clicked delete, but opera didn't update the page, or let me do anyting until I cleared the cache (reload didn't work), so I though I messed it up. Yes, it's a little off topic :) -
Daniele, thanks, I got it :)
I tried to PM you, but this doesn't seem to be supported...is the "login"-form displayed out of sight, too, in your case? This could be the reason why getsatisfaction didn't let you do anything. Scroll down, Luke! ;)
