Getting Inboxes Done

1. Zack Cerza March 19, 2008

   As if you don’t have enough work to do on the things you’ve posted about, I have another idea for you:

   Look at attachments. I’m specifically talking about large image attachments. Today I got a mail from my dad with about 8MB worth of jpegs of several baby squirrels that he saw near his house. Cute.

   Actually, I just noticed that his mail exposed a gigantic bug which I’ll have to look into later, but disregarding that for a moment: Thunderbird won’t let me do anything with that whole account while it downloads attachments, which it does without my asking. 8MB isn’t very much, but my mail server was feeling particularly sluggish this morning and so it took a while. Thunderbird also insists on embedding all of the several-megapixel jpegs into the message view - useless, as they’re each about 4 times the size of my entire screen. And then it has that attachment pane. Why is that separate from the message?

   Possible solution: Don’t put the full-size images directly into the message. Ditch the attachment pane and give me generic jpeg icons at the end of the message (bonus points for DnD support). If you *do* automatically download the attachments, replace the icons with thumbnails when you can. Also allow me to continue reading mail on that account while you fetch the attachments, please

   What happens when you click on the icons/thumbnails? Well, Thunderbird can already display images; you could either open them in a new window (scaled to fit it, click to fully expand) when I double-click, or show them in a full-window lightbox when I single-click.
2. Bryan Clark » Blog Archive » You had me at hello May 21, 2008

   [...] itself, or a little bit more of the context of the message… is there a better way for me to process my emails?  I have some mockups and ideas on how I think it could be done, but they need more refining.  [...]

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