Jeremy Zawodny asks “Is your email inbox a stack or a queue?”
Both kinda suck. Looking at how my Thunderbird is currently set up, I leave inboxes set new-top (stack), and list and historical folders new-bottom (queue), to better reflect the order of arrival of messages. Reading a stack feels somehow awkward to me; FIFO just seems more natural. As others have noted, a stack often results in not-quite-new messages getting pushed below the fold and lost for days. On the other hand, if you sort new-bottom, you feel buried by the weight of all those old messages, and it’s hard to find the starting point in boxes with a lot of traffic. That’s probably why I use stack for inboxes. Maybe I’ll switch my inboxes to new-bottom for a while, and see how it feels.
Why hasn’t someone done a horizontal ‘timeline’ summary folder view, as in Photoshop Album and many other visualizations? A horizontal bar with one vertical tick per day. The height of the tick would represent number of messages per day. The tick could be bolded or colored to indicate unread messages that day. Mouseover zoom and scroll, as in WordCount. Thoughts?
