Official Thunderbird Conversations feedback thread

[Jonathan Protzenko]

Thunderbird Conversations is still under active development, and I'm about to release a 2.0a3 version that will be compatible with the upcoming Thunderbird 3.3a3. Thunderbird Conversations includes a "would like to leave some feedback" popup window that encourages you to share some thoughts about the addon. It currently redirects to UserVoice, but Mozilla Messaging experiments are moving away from this feedback channel, and encouraging the use of the mozilla-labs groups instead. This is the topic that welcomes user feedback regarding Thunderbird Conversations.

Development version: http://jonathan.xulforum.org/files/gcv-nightlies/ (warning, requires tomorrow's Thunderbird nightly, at the time of this writing)
Stable version: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/54035/ (install it through Thunderbird, from Tools > Add-ons)
GitHub: https://github.com/protz/GMail-Conversation-View
FAQ, Questions: https://github.com/protz/GMail-Conversation-View/wiki

jonathan

[Frank J.]

hi,
just want to tell you that I love the gallery view...
Thx and regards
Frank J.

[Frank J.]

Hi,
found another bug.
if you open a gallery view and close thunderbird, open thunderbird again then the tab is restore but the gallery is not shown (says undefined).
and another one concerning the lightning-integration:
if I open an email with an (already processed) event and change to one without a event it is still shown that the event (from the previous mail) is already processed
Regards
Frank J.

[Jonathan Protzenko]

Hi,

On Tue 15 Mar 2011 10:01:04 AM CET, Frank J. wrote:
> Hi,
> found another bug.
> if you open a gallery view and close thunderbird, open thunderbird again
> then the tab is restore but the gallery is not shown (says undefined).

What exactly says "undefined"? Could you possibly send a screenshot or
give me (through copy/paste) the error message from Tools > Error
console, if any?

> and another one concerning the lightning-integration:
> if I open an email with an (already processed) event and change to one
> without a event it is still shown that the event (from the previous
> mail) is already processed

Philipp Kewisch (:Fallen) wrote the Lightning integration plugin, and
he's been notified about the bug. He says it's on his to-do list :-).

Thanks for the feedback!

jonathan
> Regards
> Frank J.
>
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[Frank J.]

oh I tricked myself with the gallery view thing, I opened the tab, then deleted the message (because it was to big and not useful anymore) and then closed thunderbird and then the title of the tabs says galler view undefined...
So its mainly my fault, but maybe its possible to not restore gallery views for deleted messages.
Thank you for your quick reply
Frank J.

[Jonathan Protzenko]

That's what I thought. I'll try to fix this for the next version, 2.0a3
is about to be released.

[Gilberto Olimpio]

I can't see the emails I've sent on the conversations any more (only the ones I've received).

Is there something I have to set up (It was working before).

Thanks,

Gilberto

[Jonathan Protzenko]

Sorry, I meant *enabled*.

[Jonathan Protzenko]

You should check under your Preferences, in the Advanced section, in
the General tab, that "Enable Global Search and Indexer" is disabled.
- Does this happen for all conversations?
- What happens if you go into your sent folder, and select the message
you sent?

jonathan

On Thu 17 Mar 2011 06:34:24 AM CET, Gilberto Olimpio wrote:

[David Bienvenu]

Newer version of Conversations was not working for me at all - it turned out that I had some news server accounts with identities that didn't have an e-mail address, so conversations was bailing out because a call to id.email was throwing an exception.

In particular, this code fails:

function fillIdentities() {
  for each (let id in fixIterator(msgAccountManager.allIdentities, Ci.nsIMsgIdentity)) {
    gIdentities[id.email.toLowerCase()] = id;
  }
  gIdentities["default"] = msgAccountManager.defaultAccount.defaultIdentity;
}

- David

[Jonathan Protzenko]

For other people who may have been experiencing this rare situation, a
new version (alpha5) has been released, and it should hopefully fix the
issue.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail-conversation-view/versions/

[Gilberto Olimpio]

It's already enabled.

- Today I have a conversation with only one sent message included on it (it was supposed to be 4 sent messages).

- If I go to the sent folder and click on the conversation, I can see all the messages (including the received ones).

(I've updated it to the last version from your personal website)

thanks,

Gilberto

[Gilberto Olimpio]

It's working again (at least that conversation that I've reported before).

I did nothing but change between 2 themes (default -> silvermel -> default).

Thanks,

Gilberto

[Jonathan Protzenko]

I think this was just a problem related to Gloda failing to index the
messages you sent in a timely manner. The action about that takes place
on <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=534449>.

Thanks for the error reporting,

jonathan

[Ian Thomas]

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is the expected behaviour, but I often see multiple entries in my inbox for a single conversation. If I click on one of these then I get the full conversation, and if I archive / delete then it moves all the entries.

Surely I should only ever see the most recent email in the conversation?

Regards,
Ian

[Jonathan Protzenko]

I think you should make sure you have selected View > Sort By >
Threaded. This is the expected behavior, I've written over the weekend
a short user guide that should hopefully be part of the Thunderbird
FLOSS manual. In the meanwhile, I suggest you watch the screencast from
http://mozillalabs.com/messaging/2010/12/07/announcing-thunderbird-conversations/

jonathan

[Ian Thomas]

Thanks, turning threading on certainly helps, but it still seems a bit weird to see the multiple entries. Surely anything that Thunderbird is threading is a conversation, and therefore any of the items in the thread should display all items from the conversation?

Ian

[Jonathan Protzenko]

I'm afraid I don't understand. Make sure you hit View > Threads >
Collapse all threads. Then, one line = one conversation.

[Leho Kraav]

(note: i'm a non-gmail user)

is it possible/feasible to make Space-key act as a single-key thread browser? i.e. select thread, hit space to pagedn, when first message ends, next message is automatically selected, space to scroll down again, etc, when final message is read, hitting space also moves focus back to thread pane.

having to tab into and in your head sort of maintain info about being or not being in conversations focus just doesn't seem right.

[Leho Kraav]

ok spacebar handling is known https://github.com/protz/GMail-Conversation-View/issues#issue/146.

[Leho Kraav]

is there a way to do away with the message pane and assign Enter key to open all new tabs from thread pane with Conversations? i think that might be an unprecedented jump in TB mail reading usability. so tired of having to feel like i'm forced to look at e-mail through a keyhole yet it's way too much work to do it in any other way.

[Jonathan Protzenko]

That's a valid concern, which has been raised by several people before.
Please note that the first button in the conversation toolbar does
precisely that (although the wording, which reads "save this
conversation in a new tab", is not very clear — this has been fixed
since then). Apart from that, the latest development version available
at http://jonathan.xulforum.org/files/gcv-nightlies/ will open a
conversation in a new tab if you hit enter or double-click on a thread
in the message list. I'm still waiting to see if that's a viable
option, though. It might interfere with other scenarios which I haven't
thought of yet, so any feedback will be most welcome.

[Reg]

Thunderbird conversations is an interesting add-on, and the main reason I tried it was the attachment previewer that creates handy thumbnails of the attached files at the end of the email. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work the way I expected (similar to Windows Live Mail attachment previewer), and it is only working on Miramar 3.3 (Thunderbird pre-release). I sure hope the attachment previewer improves, for it is the only add-on for Thunderbird promising this unique, but important function. Thanks.

[Jonathan Protzenko]

On Thu 24 Mar 2011 12:23:15 AM CET, Reg wrote:
> Thunderbird conversations is an interesting add-on, and the main reason
> I tried it was the attachment previewer that creates handy thumbnails of
> the attached files at the end of the email. Unfortunately it doesn't
> seem to work the way I expected

Can you elaborate on that?

[Rich Renomeron]

I really like this addon.   It's enough to make me run Miramar, with all its rough edges (and Lightning nightlies), as my primary email program for the time being.  It might even make me learn git, so I can poke around at the source.

One thing I don't like about it is that the font is way too small on my setup.  I set my default font size smaller than the default (13) so using the wide view is manageable.  Since Conversations sets its "default" size to 75% of whatever the user sets, the result is 9 or 10px.  And what's worse, it doesn't apply the shrink factor consistently -- when displaying email I get from people using Outlook, the font size is the same as the "classic" mail reader.  I'm sure that's because of some CSS subtlety, but I haven't really looked into it.

So I usually run a slightly modified version where I change the textSize in the PostStreamingFixesMixIn in message.js to 1.0 * defaultSize, instead of 12/16 * defaultSize.  What I'd like to see is a preference that would make this "Shrink Factor" customizable (via the config editor, at least for now), with a default of 0.75.  I'll gladly code it up (I'm at least halfway there anyway) when I get some time, hopefully in the next week or so.

The other problem I've noticed is that after I encounter a message with a meeting invite in it, the iMIP bar (i.e "This message contains an invitation to an event; Tentative/Decline/Accept) shows up in every message displayed thereafter.  Not sure why that happens.

Thanks!

Rich

--

 From the Desktop of Rich Renomeron
  Infinity is never finished.

[Leho Kraav]

thanks for the feedback. if you got a moment please transfer the feature ideas and quirks to github issues and add your vote to existing ones, increases the chance of anyone doing something about them.

[Jonathan Protzenko]

Hi Rich,

First of all, thanks for all the feedback.

On 03/25/2011 03:38 AM, Rich Renomeron wrote:

I really like this addon.   It's enough to make me run Miramar, with all its rough edges (and Lightning nightlies), as my primary email program for the time being.  It might even make me learn git, so I can poke around at the source.

One thing I don't like about it is that the font is way too small on my setup.  I set my default font size smaller than the default (13) so using the wide view is manageable.  Since Conversations sets its "default" size to 75% of whatever the user sets, the result is 9 or 10px.  And what's worse, it doesn't apply the shrink factor consistently -- when displaying email I get from people using Outlook, the font size is the same as the "classic" mail reader.  I'm sure that's because of some CSS subtlety, but I haven't really looked into it.

So I usually run a slightly modified version where I change the textSize in the PostStreamingFixesMixIn in message.js to 1.0 * defaultSize, instead of 12/16 * defaultSize.  What I'd like to see is a preference that would make this "Shrink Factor" customizable (via the config editor, at least for now), with a default of 0.75.  I'll gladly code it up (I'm at least halfway there anyway) when I get some time, hopefully in the next week or so.

This issue has been reported more and more over the last week, so I guess I need to do something about it. And yes, there are some subtle issues with CSS, and the fact that some messages sent by Outlook enforce a font size regardless of what the user uses as a default font size. But that's irrelevant to what I'm about to discuss now.

I doubt I'll be able to find a solution that satisfies everyone's needs, and I don't think the shrink factor should be put as a pref... The main issue is that Andy (the Mozilla Messaging designer) has made a mockup with fixed-size fonts everywhere, using px sizes. While this gives a great consistent look, it does not play well with users changing their default sizes.
- Default font size is 16px on Linux and Windows, 17px on Mac.
- Andy made his design so that it expects a 12px font size for the message bodies.
- Changing the default font size affects the message bodies, but not the conversation chrome (conversation chrome = everything outside the message bodies: title, contacts, quick reply, etc.).

The current solution is:
- use 12px fixed-size for the conversation chrome (this is the initial design choice),
- use 75% of the default font size for the message bodies (i.e. roughly 12px).

The advantages are:
- if the user chose to have bigger fonts, this means the message bodies are bigger as well (restart required, Thunderbird Conversations doesn't pick that up on-the-fly yet),
- the conversation chrome stays consistent at 12px.

What would be needed now is to tweak the CSS to use relative font sizes for the conversation chrome as well, so that if the user prefers to have bigger fonts, the conversation chrome is bigger as well. This is especially difficult since everything has been designed with 12px in mind: margins, buttons height, offsets, etc. etc. But this is probably the right thing to do. Bryan had started work on this, but there was an issue with the height of the buttons.

In your case, this means you would have a conversation chrome that's *smaller* than what you have now, but consistent with the smaller message size too. I'm afraid this is the right thing to do: you asked for a smaller display font, so this means the conversation is smaller as well. Asking for a smaller display font makes everything smaller: websites in content tabs, the start page... However, you will be able to fix this easily by focusing the conversation, and hitting Ctrl/Cmd and +, to use the zoom feature and increase the font sizes in the conversation only.

I hope this answers your concern! I'll definitely fix this for the next release.

jonathan

The other problem I've noticed is that after I encounter a message with a meeting invite in it, the iMIP bar (i.e "This message contains an invitation to an event; Tentative/Decline/Accept) shows up in every message displayed thereafter.  Not sure why that happens.

Thanks!

Rich

--

 From the Desktop of Rich Renomeron
  Infinity is never finished.

[Frank J.]

Hi,
found something else that is breaking user experience:
if you are writing a quickreply and get another mail in the thread (for example reading-notification) the new mail kills the quick reply window (forever).
As the reading-notification is the last new message there seems to be no way to get back to the quickreply window.
Thx
Frank J.

[Jonathan Protzenko]

So what you mean is if a new message arrives in the thread, we lose the
current quick reply? This is very weird because I've tried my best to
make sure this does not happen. Could it be you were in a state where
the save button of the quick reply was disabled? That would explain
what you witnessed...

[Frank J.]

hmm...
maybe it is because the Return Receipt is a message that is send earlier the one with the reply window
or because it is in a different folder
I dont know
when is the save button disabled?
I dont know if it was disabled. Sorry. If I see it again I will watch closely.
Regards.

[Jonathan Protzenko]

The save button is disabled when Gloda has not indexed your message
yet. Gloda assigns each conversation a unique id, which allows us to
associate a draft to a conversation. If Gloda has not indexed your
message, there's no underlying conversation, which means we have no key
to associate the draft to, which the only (hopefully, rare) where it
might happen that the quick reply is "lost"...

[Rich Renomeron]

Jonathan,

Thanks for the explanation.  I'm with you on the "smaller display font = smaller chrome" issue, but after thinking about it some, I think there might be an unintended side effect with the message composer.

I tried running with the default font sizes (16px) today, and the conversations looked fine, as the 75% resize was close to what I was using with the classic reader.  But when I used the composer, the text was so large it was a distraction, especially when compared to what I was seeing in the Conversations pane.

For now, I got around the large-text issue in the composer by using a userContent.css file (body { text-size: 75%;}), and now the composer and Conversations are in harmony.  Maybe this could be one of the (optional) tweaks that Conversations does on first install?  Certainly a more sustainable path for me than maintaining a private git repo with my 1-line change. :)

Thanks,
Rich

--

 From the Desktop of Rich Renomeron

  When fear speaks, truth keeps silent.

[Jonathan Protzenko]

I do agree that the composer font seems exceedingly large now in
comparison. Bryan, do you have any thoughts on this issue?

[Frank J.]

hmm maybe thats the reason...
but if I am sitting at my pc and receive a new mail thats a pretty common scenario
Maybe it is possible to check if the quickreply is in use to prevent thats it is getting killed by new mails?
Thx anyway

[Jonathan Protzenko]

Do you mean that the quick reply actually *disappears*, as in "the
quick reply is definitely gone", or do you mean that you lose the text
you had typed so far?

[Frank J.]

the quick reply window was not displayed anymore... because there was another (newer) message in the thread

[Jonathan Protzenko]

Oh that's a different issue, I thought you meant you lost the draft you
had typed so far. Forget what I said before.

When a new message arrives, the quick reply is moved to the last
message in the thread. You should make sure it is expanded if you want
to see the quick reply. Are there any errors in Tools > Error console?

[Reg]

When I tested on Miramar, I expected to see small inline thumbnail grid of all attached pics whenever I opened an email. After a while I realized that only happens if you open the email in a new tab using the small button (square with arrow pointing top-right), not in a new window as I always do. When I tried that, I got thumbnails to show at the bottom of the email, and even the option for gallery view. It was great. Sadly this way didn't work for all messages that had pics attached, for reasons I couldn't figure out.

I guess sometimes it shows other times it doesn't. Either way it would be nice if it the pic series could open into an external viewer, so even if a thumbnail gallery doesn't work, at least an external slide gallery might. Miramar couldn't do that for multiple pics (only individual pics), and neither did the addon, hence it didn't work as expected. Having said that, the included gallery view is a good alternative (when it does work), although an inline thumbnail-grid that's always available, would really be great. Thanks.

[Jonathan Protzenko]

It is surprising that the attached images should not be thumbnailed. Is
it a message that just arrived? Is it a message that's stored on a
remote IMAP folder? Are you on a slow connexion? Did you have no
attachment listing at all (i.e. not even the filenames), or was it just
the thumbnails that were slow to arrive?

Thanks,

jonathan

[Reg]

They were old messages stored in local folders and POP inbox (hotmail on Miramar). Actually I'm on a fast connection of 14 megabits. None were IMAP. Even the attachment listing was missing, except when I switched to the classic reader at which point the listing became visible.

However, now I notice if I move the problematic messages to my IMAP folder (Gmail on Miramar) then the thumbnail feature seems to work, although not when you open the message in a new window, only if you use the special button (square with arrow).

Further, if I move them back from IMAP to their original local folders, some messages that were previously not showing, now started to show the thumbnails. This fixed the messages, some only partially (only showing listing: no thumbs), but at least gallery view was now available on all of them, even the partially fixed messages. On the emails that still showed no thumbnails I waited for ever, and retried a few times, but they simply would not appear.

Clearly the problem does not occur on IMAP, but only on local and POP folders. By moving them back and forth though IMAP, some got (partially) fixed. Hope this helps a bit. Thanks, Reg.