Mike Gratton wrote: >... > Does anyone else think that the address pane is too long by default? > At the moment, it defaults to being big enough for four addresses.
That's the same as 4.x. > Given that many, if not most messages are addressed to one recipient, > it would make sense (to me at least, after a few glasses of wine.. > ^_^) if the address pane was much smaller by default, say, 2 addresses > long. There are two problems with that. Firstly, if you have set Mozilla to automatically BCC (or CC) yourself on all your messages, and you reply a message, that's the two rows taken already. It becomes quite difficult (and non-obvious) to add more recipients. Secondly, if the pane was only two rows high, the scrollbar wouldn't have a thumb -- just up and down arrow buttons. That would make it tedious to scroll through a long list of recipients (or through a long list of attachments, which would have the same problem since the attachment pane shares vertical dimensions with the address pane). > As it is, the address pane cannot be resized to anything less than > four addresses, which is annoying. Even if it sill defaults to four > addresses long, if the minimum size of the address pane can be set to > two or one addresses long, and if changes made to the size of it by > the user persist, it would be good. >... Actually, I think the address pane should show as many rows as there are recipients. If there are 200 recipients, there should be 200 rows. Naturally, this means that the addressing area should look less chrome-like, and scroll with the rest of the message. I realized this while reading stories <http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/02/1415251> about people replying to hundreds of individual recipients (as opposed to mailing lists) without realizing it. I think this is partly due to mail clients like Mozilla which only show three or four recipients at once, hiding the rest behind a scrollbar. If people had to scroll past a few screenfuls of recipients before typing their message to hundreds of people, they would get a much better idea of the magnitude of what they were about to do. Secondly, it would be easier for those who really *meant* to send to a lot of people to do so, as they could see much more of the recipient list at once while they were editing it. And thirdly, it would solve your problem of the pane taking up too much space, as you would be able to scroll it out of the window completely once you'd finished entering recipients and started typing the message itself. -- Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla UI Design component default assignee thing <http://mpt.phrasewise.com/>
