GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 714025
Subject is shown for every mail in the thread
Last modified: 2021-07-05 13:25:02 UTC
---- Reported by geary-maint@gnome.bugs 2013-09-05 08:11:00 -0700 ---- Original Redmine bug id: 7441 Original URL: http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/7441 Searchable id: yorba-bug-7441 Original author: Udit Mahajan Original description: Geary is built with the idealogy of having threading for every mail account type (gmail, yahoo etc). So for threading the subject should be common, it shouldn't be shown on every mail in the thread. ---- Additional Comments From geary-maint@gnome.bugs 2013-09-05 17:46:00 -0700 ---- ### History #### #1 Updated by Jim Nelson 3 months ago * **Category** set to _conversations_ The same subject is not guaranteed throughout a conversation; a user can change the subject at will and Geary will still add them to an existing conversation. Still, it's worth considering if it's necessary for each message to display a Subject: line. Perhaps Geary should only display the Subject: in the first message and leave it out of the remaining unless the subject line changes, in which case messages following it again omit the Subject. There's more thought that needs to be made here before we go down this path. #### #2 Updated by Udit Mahajan 3 months ago Perhaps we can show subject at the top of the message lists and then group messages by it. If the list has more than one subjects, messages can be grouped under respective subject heading. --- Bug imported by chaz@yorba.org 2013-11-21 20:24 UTC --- This bug was previously known as _bug_ 7441 at http://redmine.yorba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7441 Unknown version " in product geary. Setting version to "!unspecified". Unknown milestone "unknown in product geary. Setting to default milestone for this product, "---". Setting qa contact to the default for this product. This bug either had no qa contact or an invalid one. Resolution set on an open status. Dropping resolution
I'd actually like to remove the Subject from individual messages (per the GNOME Mail designs), since most of the time it's redundant and hence a waste of space. As Jim notes however it can change throughout a conversation though, and I can imagine some other use cases for keeping it: 1. Alice want to copy the subject to the clipboard 2. Bob sends messages where the only content is in the subject, despite his corporate sig being several hundred lines long 3. Charlie receives a message with a link in the subject line 4. Dallas and starts a completely unrelated conversation by replying to an old message and changing the subject line. (1) and (4) could be handled quite nicely now Bug 765516 has landed, by putting the putting the subject in a GtkListBox header in between messages, only at the top and if the subject changes: --------------------------------------- | Hot topic | |---------------------------------------| | [☺] Alice 15 min ago | | So this is what I'm talking about... | |---------------------------------------| | [☺] Bob 10 min ago | | Oh yes I see. | --------------------------------------- --------------------------------------- | My hovercraft is full of eels | |---------------------------------------| | [☺] Dallas 5 min ago | | Let me tell you all about this... | The header provides a place to put UI for splitting a conversation in two, in the case of (4) occurring. This would also provide a nice way of displaying multiple conversations in the viewer when multiple are selected in the conversation list, in case we wanted to allow that in the future. However, due to use cases (2) and (3), I'm not sure using a header is appropriate. So perhaps treating it as a virtual first line of the message is a better approach: --------------------------------------- | [☺] Alice 5 min ago | | To: Bob | |---------------------------------------| | Hot topic | |---------------------------------------| | Hi Bob, | | So this is what I'm talking about. |
CC'ing Allan for an opinion.
The other obvious approach would be to show a minimal summary in the header of each message, and then provide a way to expand it or show more details (Gmail does this with a popover). Sometimes the headers can be quite big and contain a lot of information - sometimes more information than the message itself - and this would help to keep the UI focused.
Mass-reassigning bugs that won't make 0.12.
Ah, good point. So fixing Bug 713727 would provide a way to fix this.
(In reply to Allan Day from comment #3) > The other obvious approach would be to show a minimal summary in the header > of each message, and then provide a way to expand it or show more details > (Gmail does this with a popover). Hey again Alan, I've put a mockup of this approach over in Bug 713727, which takes not showing the subject by default into account. If you have a moment, please do have a look and let me know what you think of the design. Also, as part of the work for Bug 730682, it seems like there should be space in the headerbar for the subject, so having that and expandable message details would take care of this nicely.
Work on Bug 730682 is freeing up space on the Conversation GtkHeaderBar, making it possible to show the subject there, further reducing the need to show it per-message.
Err… Actually, for a some time I wanted to report the bug for exactly the opposite problem: individual mails in conversation should have the conversation title (I guess this means the bug being discussed is "solved"). This is a problem because on mailing lists you often have a single conversation with individual mails called "PATCH[0/12]…", "PATCH[1/12]", etc. And when someone answers to a 7th mail, you can't find where it was. But I welcome any alternative design solutions that doesn't involve keeping the subject line. Or, maybe, we can hide the subject when conversation has it the same throughout the thread.
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/geary/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.