The community Taskforce initiative has now come to a close.
Thanks to everyone who made thoughtful and genuine contributions to the website.
All submissions will be kept publically available for the forseeable future for reference purposes.

This website is part of the community Taskforce initiative

Submission details

promote
8 +12/-4 votes
demote
change vote

Mail: add tabbed windowing

Submitted by mojo2012 on February 4, 2009 to Usability

If you want to read more than one mail at a time (sometimes happens to me ...) then it's very annoying that there are multiple mail windows open.
Thunderbird 3 (shredder) goes an alternative way: it uses tabs to display the mails and the mail folders. Ihmo this is a great idea for an option.
Look at the Thunderbird 3 image to see how this works.

Add tab support to Mail.

Low

Medium

Not fixed

Discussion (5 comments)

mojo2012 wrote on February 4, 2009, 6:55pm

Added new image attachment.

noobert wrote on February 4, 2009, 10:39pm

But how would you use Exposé with tabs?

mojo2012 wrote on February 5, 2009, 8:53am

I really like exposé. But I prefer to use it, to switch between applications that are distinguishable. If I have 3 mail windows with plain text open, I most certainly can't distinguish them just by looking at them. So I have to hover over the exposé image and read the text. I think that just a plain tabbar would be much faster.

Btw, don't you use tabs in firefox or safari, just because tabs dont's work with exposé?

abitgone wrote on February 5, 2009, 10:05am

I can understand a tabbed view within the message pane for preview purposes, but not on the whole application view - that would be a little confusing.

This is one area where I don't think tabs would work as well as having individual windows open for the attachments.

mojo2012 wrote on February 5, 2009, 5:27pm

Ever tried TB3? Though the tabbed view is for the whole application window, it works quite well. The Normal pane view is a seperate tab. So you can go back everygtime.

But to figure out how it works best would be apples homework ;-)

abitgone wrote on February 6, 2009, 1:15pm

I must admit I haven't - I've used Outlook 2007 on the PC, which has a similar idea:

The message window has a sort-of-tabs interface, which allows you to switch between the message body and a preview of each individual attachment.

I think if the tabs were within the message body, that'd work well - I'll have to give TB3 a look; even though I don't actually use a traditional mail application anymore (my iPhone and Offline GMail access have made it a non-necessity).

You might also be interested in...