Pandora needs a message editing toolbar like Eudora's (and navigating long item selection lists)

Pandora's creator Brana Bujenovic has done a fine job in morphing Eudora into Pandora Mail, significantly modernising and enhancing features while doing so.

I'm getting quite excited about Pandora, and in this blog I'll continue to document my findings and opinions and invite readers' comments so that together we can make Pandora better and better over time.

I hope (and expect) that Brana won't be put off by my findings and opinions, all documented in this blog with the aim of making positive suggestions. To be frank, in my first year of being an octogenarian I'd rather be doing something else! But I will keep making the effort to provide a meaning contribution!

This post is about one of the fundamental aspects of e-mail, namely, the creation and editing of message content. Specifically, it's about the very basic aspects of content editing rather than the more intricate aspects, the simpler editing controls that we use for the bulk of message content (a.k.a. the 80/20 rule).

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I was prompted to write about this as soon as I started creating messages in Pandora. I just couldn't find a quick and easy way to -– of all things –- perform the basic function of choosing different font sizes.

Here's an example of selecting text size from the message editing toolbar (or whatever it's called) in Eudora. It's convenient and easy to use for operating with the commonest message content editing options:

I'm quite surprised that Pandora doesn't seem to have such a toolbar, at least I couldn't find one. All content editing in Pandora seems to have to be done via pull-down  Edit Menu selections (at the very top) or via context menu (right mouse click) selections in the body of the message:

I'm finding that my basic content creation and updating is noticeably slowed down by only having the drop-down or context menu approach.

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In the second screenshot, I make the additional observation that there are various places in Pandora where you're presented with long lists of items that you're have to scroll through vertically, and I find this scrolling to be painfully slow and cumbersome.

Then,  you have scrolled way down a list (for example, choosing Verdana font) and next time you want to choose a different item from the list (say, Arial font) then you have to laboriously scroll all the way back up through the list). On my system, which is reasonably powerful, it takes at least twenty seconds to scroll from one end to the other of the Text Color list.

Eudora (and various other apps) display such long lists in multi-column format like the following, lightly blurred to protect the innocent. The list items might get rendered to the left or to the right, dependent on screen real estate positioning In the following example (transfer of a message to one of my many mailboxes) it's rendered to the left:

Selecting an item is much easier/faster using this approach.

Eudora versus Pandora - Tabs for mailboxes (and web browsers)

The web browser that I use most of the time is Waterfox, the so-called Classic version of it which I have carefully tailored with a set of old-style XPI add-ons in order to maximise my browsing efficiency and comfort.

When I get newsletters in my mail client's Inbox, I usually launch multiple news article links from each newsletter and often finish up with at least twenty or thirty browser tabs open at once. Within each Waterfox window I have configured the Tab Mix Plus add-on to display multiple rows of tabs, looking like the following:

With this Waterfox add-on, how the tabs are displayed and browser features are handled is controlled by a myriad of useful options. Here is the Tab Mix Plus "Display" panel for configuring the Tab Bar:

And currently I have selected "Multi-Row" with up to three rows of tabs to be displayed:

On other Options panels I've set tabs to have rounded top corners with the active tab coloured yellow, and clicking with the middle mouse button to close the highlighted tab:

All in all, this add-on does an exceptionally good job of managing tabbed windows and what happens upon various mouse actions.

The above is all a precursor to reviewing how Eudora and Pandora handle tabs.

Here's the Eudora tab bar, with lots of mailboxes open. There is no way to control the tabs' relative locations

As more and more mailboxes get opened in Eudora, the tabs become narrower and narrower, until they reach a tiny size that displays only Eudora's  generic mailbox icon, If you hover the mouse over a tab, thankfully the tab's title is displayed as a tool tip:

When there are fewer tabs, the tab labels gradually start making an appearance:

If you right-click a tab, you can close it thus:

My criticism is that this requires two button clicks and I wish it would be better if -- as mentioned above for Waterfox browser (also for many other Windows apps) -- a single centre-button-click could be used to close the tab. Some of us would save hundreds of button clicks per day if this were implemented in Eudora.

Moving now to Pandora Mail client, here's an example of its tab bar with more than five or six mailboxes open. The tabs are of fixed size, and they don't shrink in width as more mailboxes are opened, but instead scroll horizontally. The red circle indicates where you cause the tabs to scroll left or right:

I've found that such horizontal scrolling becomes rathe tedious when you have more that bout ten mailboxes open. You must click on the "X" at the right-hand end of a tab, or as with Eidora right-click the tab and select "Close" as follows:

In conclusion, I'd really appreciate it if Pandora gets the ability to display multiple rows of mailbox tabs -- a selectable number of rows -- and to allow centre-clicking on a tab to close it.

Furthermore, in many other Windows apps (browsers, and more) you can rearrange tabs by dragging them to new locations in the tab bar, and Pandora should get this capability too.

Kryptonite puffs, anyone?

Persona names are easily changed in Pandora

Pandora carries over from Eudora the ability to define different personas (or personalities), which enable you to do all sorts of tailoring about mail messages are retrieved from mail servers or sent to them.

There is a mandatory "dominant" persona, the bare minimum for Eudora or Pandora to operate. You may create as many other personas as you like, to cater for different mail accounts on different mail servers (Gmail, Outlook Mail, AOL, or whatever), and to cater for different attributes that need to be configured for each specific mail server (POP versus IMAP, security options, account banes and their passwords, etc).

Each persona has its own mix of settings. These settings are stored in different files within Eudora.

In Eudora, when you create a new persona you must give it a unique name (whatever suits you, such as "My Bank" or "Gmail" and the like). An annoyance in Eudora is that there is no way to directly change a persona's name.

If you have a technical bent, you can edit various Eudora files, but this is beyond the capabilities of your average Eudora user.

Not so with Pandora. You merely right-click on the personality name , select Rename… from the context menu:

Then you simply enter the new name:

It couldn't be any easier.

Pandora Mail toolbar improvements compared with Eudora

Just a few more observations in this post. Firstly, here's my toolbar customisation in Eudora. This works best for me after decades of use. I realise that others will want a different arrangement, it's definitely a matter of personal preference.

And in Pandora I've gone for a pretty similar arrangement:

In just over a week with Pandora, I've found that there are distinctly more toolbar configuration options. You launch toolbar customisation from the Settings nenu:

You add a mailbox (in this example, Pandora Mail) by dragging from the right-hand panel to the desired toolbar location:

 

A distinct advantage over Eudora is that the toolbar button for each added mailbox  has the mailbox name (such as "Pandora Mail") displayed in the toolbar. In Eudora, you finish up with identical mailbox icons and not toolbar text, so you can' tell them apart (only by mousing over a toolbar icon will you see a Toolbar Tip appear for a few seconds).

Adding button separators to the toolbar in Eudora is an unusual operation (you hold down  the Alt key and move a toolbar icon sideways, whereupon a separator appears). In Pandora, you simply drag the <------ button separator ------> from the right panel to the desired location in the toolbar (similarly for button padding).

What's more, you can drag multiple button separators side-by-side to make a sort of "thick button separator" which is what I've done to cause the "Delete" button really stand out (so that I'm less likely to click it inadvertently):

Yet another nicety for you to consider migration from Eudora to Pandora.