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Old 13 Mar 2010, 01:02 PM   #1
Jens
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Join Date: Nov 2005
Posts: 18
Things I Loathe About the New Fastmail Interface

Last Sunday, half a dozen of my emails weren't delivered. Fastmail lost them. They sent me an email to apologize. "So sorry, you use the old interface, hah hah."

I decided to try the new interface again, if only to make sure my email actually gets delivered. Wow is it awful.

Here's what I hate about the new interface:


Compose Screen
-------------------------

* When I send mail to "John Smith," I save it in mailbox "John_Smith". (most of the time). In the old interface, this was easy. *Above* the compose text box was a drop down to select in which folder to save the sent email. In the new interface, I am constantly forgetting to scroll down *below* the compose text box, where I have to select "show message options". As a result, several times a day I have to go to my Sent Items folder and move emails where they belong.

* The Discard button is right where the Send button should be. On several occasions I have accidentally deleted emails. Sure, it throws up a msgbox, but fastmail has so many msgboxes I never read the damn things. Right there at the bottom right, where the Send button should be they put the Discard button. What is up with that???

* The Compose default font is *grey*. Not easy-to-read black, but squint-to-read grey on a white background. Why??? Ditto this problem in Notepad.

* In the To:, CC: and BCC: fields, fastmail tries to be helpful. It turns email addresses into these cute little blue boxes with x's on the corners. What a pain! I want to see the email address behind the name. I want to be able cut and paste these emails. Maybe I want to move a CC to a BCC, whatever. Fastmail won't let me do this.

* Middle-click paste does not work in Linux/Gnome. How often does it happen you see an email address on a web site, you swipe the text, then try to middle click paste in the To: field? But no! This doesn't work any longer in fastmail. This sucks!


Mailbox View
-------------------

* Mouseovers. I hate them. Turn them off. All of them! I don't want my emails flashing yellow at me when I mouseover. I don't want my message counts dependent on a mouseover action. Give it to me straight, all of it.

View Email Screen
---------------------------

* Where's the goddam Subject: header? I don't want a bigger font Subject *above* the other headers. I want to the see the actual word "Subject:", colon and everything, where it has always been for the history of email: *below* the other headers, immediately above the message.


The entire experience of using the new interface is irritating. It makes me question, seriously question, why I continue to use fastmail.
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Old 14 Mar 2010, 01:27 AM   #2
JamesHenderson
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I have to say that none of your issues are a problem to me. Overall I like the new interface.

J.
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Old 14 Mar 2010, 03:23 AM   #3
digp
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jens View Post
Last Sunday, half a dozen of my emails weren't delivered. Fastmail lost them. They sent me an email to apologize. "So sorry, you use the old interface, hah hah."
pls provide some more info.
if true this is very worrying.
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Old 14 Mar 2010, 04:32 AM   #4
Jens
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digp,

last Sunday (6 March), there was a glitch involving delivery of mail for users of the old interface. Fastmail sent me an email listing the addresses and times, but said the emails had since been deleted. Luckily, I save all my emails, so I was able to resend half a dozen emails without having to re-write them all, but others may not have been so lucky.

j
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Old 14 Mar 2010, 06:23 AM   #5
Sherry
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digp, this StatusBlog entry may have been the problem.

Some emails sent via old web interface not being sent for last 21 hours

Sherry
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Old 14 Mar 2010, 07:31 AM   #6
Prognathous
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jens View Post
* In the To:, CC: and BCC: fields, fastmail tries to be helpful. It turns email addresses into these cute little blue boxes with x's on the corners. What a pain! I want to see the email address behind the name. I want to be able cut and paste these emails. Maybe I want to move a CC to a BCC, whatever. Fastmail won't let me do this.
You can hover with the mouse to see the address and double click the box to see/edit/copy the whole thing, but I agree this behavior is needlessly complex. The old one was better.

Other than this one there are very few things that the old UI did better. Perhaps the most significant one, for me, is the draft autosave bug. I'm really disappointed to see that Fastmail hasn't fixed it or at least offer a pref to disable this "feature" altogerther.

Other top annoyances:

- Forwarding a mail as an attachment is much more complicated with the new UI
- The "FastMail.FM is detecting Javascript support in your browser" message during login
- Long non-informative messages that even the most technical users can't figure out, such as "Altered session time: Your session has been set to expire after 8 hours of inactivity (based on saved cookie)", or whatever it is now.

With that said, the new UI is still a significant improvement over the old one and I, for one, am not switching back.

Prog.
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Old 14 Mar 2010, 07:45 AM   #7
janusz
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Prognathous View Post
The "FastMail.FM is detecting Javascript support in your browser" message during login
I've never seen this one...
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Old 14 Mar 2010, 08:03 AM   #8
Sherry
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I don't see that one either but I think it's because I disabled it when it first started? I don't remember how but I think Rob posted the way to do it when someone started a thread on it?

Sherry
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Old 14 Mar 2010, 08:10 AM   #9
Sherry
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Ok, I found Rob's post about the "detecting Javascript support in your browser" and used the way he said to stop it.

"FastMail.FM is detecting Javascript support in your browser"

Sherry
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Old 14 Mar 2010, 08:11 AM   #10
Prognathous
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Yes, here's the thread:

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=55861

To quote myself about Rob's workaround: "it works. Too bad it only helps those reading this forum, a tiny minority of the user base."

Prog.

Edit: Sherry beat me to it :-)
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Old 14 Mar 2010, 07:43 PM   #11
Merovingian
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JamesHenderson View Post
I have to say that none of your issues are a problem to me. Overall I like the new interface.

J.
same here. I've been using the new interface since Beta, and I think it's world's better than what we had.
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Old 15 Mar 2010, 07:29 AM   #12
hadaso
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jens View Post
... In the old interface, this was easy. *Above* the compose text box was a drop down to select in which folder to save the sent email. In the new interface, I am constantly forgetting to scroll down *below* the compose text box, where I have to select "show message options"...
This code in my "tweaks.js" file moved the message options above the message body in the Compose screen:
Code:
// Move message options section above message in the compose screen
whenDOMready(function(){
   if ($('compose')) {
      $('messageOptions').inject($('messageBody'),'before');
   }
});
It's not perfect since it occupies quite a lot of screen real estate, but it was just a two minute hack. With a bit more tweaking of the same sort anything can be moved anywhere.

I also have this definition somewhre in the beginning of tweaks.js just to help me have slightly more inteligible code:
Code:
function whenDOMready(fn){window.addEvent('domready',fn)};
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Old 15 Mar 2010, 07:49 AM   #13
hadaso
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Prognathous View Post
You can hover with the mouse to see the address and double click the box to see/edit/copy the whole thing, ...
One can also select multiple boxes, cut them and paste them in one of the other address fields. It might take some time if there are many addresses and a slow computer.
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Old 15 Mar 2010, 08:54 PM   #14
Mystakill
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I made a tweak to Hadaso's tweak the other day, which which streamlines & condenses the compose options a bit further. Tab indexes could probably use some fixing up as well because it's pretty messy at the moment.

To swap the message actions to their *proper* places, see the tweaks.css wiki for some possible solutions. A number of us have contributed to both, and additional mods can be found in the forums here on EMD as well.

As for the missing "Subject:", the follow entry in tweaks.css *works*, with the caveat that any <h1> tags in a message will also display the same text:
Code:
h1:before { content: "Subject: " }
tweaks.js could be used to isolate just the first <h1>, but some people prefer not to do it that way due to lack of proper semantics or unfamiliarity with JavaScript. I just sent a request to Rob asking him to add a CSS ID to the subject <h1> so that it can be styled in tweaks.css.

Last edited by Mystakill : 15 Mar 2010 at 09:01 PM.
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Old 17 Mar 2010, 02:00 AM   #15
Mystakill
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Class .messageSubject is now live on both beta & production servers. Thanks Rob!

The subject prefix can now be added with the following:
Code:
h1.messageSubject:before { content: "Subject: " }
Additional styling, such as background colors, borders, etc., can also be done to make the subject line stand out even further. For example:
Code:
h1.messageSubject { background-color: #900; color: white; border: 1px outset #900 }
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