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Comment by Twirrim | Hacker News Reader

They're improving the email display by reducing the amount of space showing the actual email?

By very rough measurement it's reducing the email display area by about an inch, dropping it from 4" to 3". I really don't want that, myself. I open an email because I want to read the email. That's my primary focus. One of the really nice things about the K9 interface has been that so much of the screen gets dedicated to the thing I actually care about (contrast this to the way that web interfaces like outlook.com love to almost relegate the email content to the bottom most corner)

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To be fair, they are comparing a best case scenario email in the current UI to a worst case email in the new UI. Multi-line subject, multi-account identifier, tags, external images. So it looks to me like there's actually higher information density in the new UI. A little difficult to tell without a direct comparison of the same email and settings though.

They're also saying the padding “will get tightened up” [1].

I'd also do some other changes though [2], like removing that border around the “Show remote images” button and instead letting it bleed to the whole panel (a trick I've first seen in the Telegram app).

[1]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/12/thunderbird-for-android...

[2]: https://u.ale.sh/tb-redesign-suggestions.png

Yeah, I do think they had a bit of a faux pas with this showcase by not showing like-for-like differences. The first email didn't have multi-line subjects or anything like that, so it's hard to compare the two and see why the update might actually be better.

I agree.

It looks to me like the only place they're really wasting space is the hefty margin above the body text.

I don't know. Seems like everything is twice or three times as large.

Click on who else was the message sent to -> appears a big box that you have to scroll to figure out who is included.

yeah I was irritated by that as well, it makes it much harder to compare the designs. I think I prefer the new one though, the old one does look a little clunky

I agree. Design updates in email clients are not that important - unless it actually also improves usability. Unfortunately, most apps just want to look fancy, not focusing on functionality.

It's wierd to use different samples for new and old ui too? Why show different email in different design, rather than same email in different design?

>I really don't want that, myself. I open an email because I want to read the email.

You have a working finger and can scroll the small amount necessary to do that. More comfortable properly spaced out/laid out UI/UX is generally ideal.

They should, though (at the very least) just let the padding/margins be configurable for the people who seem to care about this. No reason we can't have a middle ground approach.

Adding better margins and spacing around text significantly improves readability on mobile (usually it also makes UI elements easier to distinguish).

Yes, there's a limit to that, but the new design is most likely result in making emails easier to read despite stealing away screen space.

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