GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 257068
Message size indication in composer
Last modified: 2009-04-28 22:17:24 UTC
When there are attachments to an email being composed it would be great to have a status bar at the bottom of the message composer window indicating the total size of the message. My wife often sends several attachments to people but wants to check that the total message size is not too big, without having to add up all the sizes.
*** Bug 273502 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
please also make sure that it displays the *encoded* size (bug 273502).
Apologies for any spam... cc'ing usability-maint on all Evolution usability bugs. Filter on EVO-USABILITY-SPAM to ignore.
still missing in 2.5
Bumping version to a stable release.
Created attachment 126443 [details] [review] proposed evo patch for evolution;
Attachment size calculation looks good and I think displaying the total next to the attachment count is fine for now. Ultimately, I was thinking about adding a status bar to the composer. In addition to the usual displaying of tooltips as the user rolls over menu items, I thought the status bar could also show the full message size (attachments + message body) and update itself as the user types. It may also provide a suitable solution to bug #559256. Whichever way we go with the UI, we should make similar changes to CompEditor's attachment bar so it's consistent. And I need to get off my duff and finish bug #516933 so we don't have so much duplicate attachment code laying around. CC'ing Srini for his thoughts.
Hmm, do we want two string? Total size and encoded size? Just 'Total' should do. Can we look at how other clients do?
We could compare on-disk size versus encoded size of individual attachments in the properties window. But I think the number displayed in the composer window should answer the question "how big is this email?", which means encoded size. As for other mailers: Thunderbird: Can't find a size indication anywhere. Claws: Shows on-disk size (I think) of individual attachments only. Not sure about Apple Mail. I'll ask my wife to check that.
Matt, as you committed your Attachment UI rewrite, which has there some size indication (I think very similar as the above), do you consider this bug to be still opened or not?
Yeah, I guess so. It only shows the on-disk size of attachments, so it underestimates the actual size of the email. But it's better than nothing. I'll close it as FIXED.
Just add something like 28% to the on-disk size to estimate the transmission size. (256 bits / base 64 = 1.25; there is some overhead for line endings and headers etc.) You could just show the estimated total message transmission size in parentheses after the total: Message size: 10kB (~13kB transmitted)
That's not a bad idea.
Don't forget to add in the size of the message in the composer, as well as 1-2kb for email headers (I'm guessing), and a few hundred bytes per message for mime headers... Not a hard calculation overall though...