[Evolution] Suggestions on HTML mail/ML-reading

[Ng Oon-Ee <ngoonee gmail com>]

Hi all,

A few suggestions on what's been bugging me usability-wise with Evo. If
the response here is positive (meaning I don't get many "you're out of
your mind!" responses) I'll formally add them (as enhancements) to the
bug-tracker.

1. I've defaulted to PLAIN rather than HTML mails, since too many HTML
mails are unreadable on my dark theme (white text with white
background). This is misbehaviour on the author's part, but I get plenty
of these. However, sometimes I do need to view the HTML of a particular
mail (proper formatting when ppl send tables and stuff which gets
rendered to single-column in PLAIN). The only way I've figured to handle
this is to 'prefer PLAIN' and set the settings to 'show HTML' everytime
I have a HTML mail. Would suggest that, instead, a simple 'show this
message in HTML/plain' method be implemented, most likely in the menus,
or perhaps even on the toolbar.

2. I've got server-side sorting (IMAP in gmail) of my mailing lists into
a single folder. However, I tend to go back to gmail to read my MLs
because of its UI. Specifically, each thread is listed as a
conversation, you can go back and forth between conversations and just
read the whole conversation, with the already-read conversations
minimized. In evo, I have the choice between non-threaded view (which
breaks connectivity of threads) and threaded view (an old thread with
> 20 responses can totally clutter up my list of mails. The closest
approximation I've managed to find is by hiding read mails and using
threading, but there's still the (admittedly smaller) problem of long
unread threads taking up lots of vertical space, and sometimes not being
able to see the already-read parts of the thread. Something simple that
may help here is a shortcut key/button to quickly show/hide unread
messages, instead of always having to go through the menu.

Thanks for reading this far. On a side-note, are there any external evo
plugin sites, similar to mozilla's addons website? Or are the plugins
which come with evo pretty much all there are (don't get me wrong, its a
great list)?