There are many reasons for the change.

 

1) Embracing white space is important for a clean and comfortable interface.

2) Many areas of the interface are enlarged for different displays (tablets, mobile, laptops) and to better handle various DPI configurations.

3) There are 5 indicators that show on the 3rd line.

4) 50% of subjects exceed the available space and attempt to show users as much as possible.  Your using Test subjects :)

 

Hope this helps

 

 

 

Thanx Tim for taking the time to respond

 

It makes me understand it better why it's like it is.

point 1 and 2, I understand

3) size, attachment, flagged, replied/forwarded, is there a fifth? curious.

 

4) true.. not that much more length, about 17characters more.  In old version one can adjust width of the column 
Is an average lenght know for subjects?

I never heared comments about the short subject, but this is what my customer says about scrolling.. 

when you have a lot of mail
subject difference (not test subjects :D )

max width

 

but without the extra line per message there are almost twice as much messages visible (more subjects ;) )

 

I don't have the data now on subject lengths but when we reworked the interface (year ago) to determine widths of areas we had processed like 100,000 messages.  

 

Replied and Forwarded should be separate which would be 5 indicators.

1) Embracing white space is important for a clean and comfortable interface.  

        Disagree sitting at my desktop trying to process hundreds of emails daily !!!! the different font sizes uneven spcing etc is playing havok with my OCD

2) Many areas of the interface are enlarged for different displays (tablets, mobile, laptops) and to better handle various DPI configurations.   

     Fair enough why not have different options just like there used to be desktop / mobile version?

3) There are 5 indicators that show on the 3rd line.  

    Personally I dont care what size the email is its more important to see as many lines as possible

4) 50% of subjects exceed the available space and attempt to show users as much as possible.  Your using Test subjects :)     

    But how much of the line that exceeds the space is actually meaningful or actually required???? 

Yeah, unfortunately we are seeing similar things. Customers on v15 who are thinking about moving to G Suite because they use webmail exclusively and don't like the look, feel, and functionality of v17 webmail.

With five minutes work I was able to get a view like this. So my question is how can we embed custom CSS so that we can have the two line view? This is the latest version of 17 and I am using the dark theme. The code sample proof of concept below would have to be done for other themes as well.

I know my code isn't production ready but this is all I did to make it work. I know 74+24 doesn't add up to 100 either. I did this as I want to make certain that any hidden borders or borders that might be added don't break it. Again, this isn't production code but shows all that I did.

body.theme-dark #mailOverview .mailOverviewArea #mail-info-view #mailListView .panel-grid .panel-item {
    height: 50px !important;

    overflow:hidden;

}
body.theme-dark #mailOverview .mailOverviewArea #mail-info-view #mailListView .panel-grid .panel-item .mailGridItem .inboxMessage .inboxMessageSubject{
    float: left;

    width:74%;

    overflow:hidden;

}
#mailOverview .mailOverviewArea #mail-info-view #mailListView .inboxMessage .inboxMessageContent .inboxMessageLastLine{
    float: right;

    width:24%;

    overflow:hidden;

}

If there was documentation on custom themes and a way of getting it in the program I know I would get my team writing 1-line, 2-line, etc. versions as I know I have been using my "hack" all morning and even though not perfect it is working well.

Take a look here:

they even removed setting of default theme for whole smartermail server so using custom themes on environments with big number of mailboxes is very difficult because of lack of this setting.

For creation of new theme you can create new .css file with your name in:

SmarterMail\MRS\App_Data\Skins

and just start your modified CSS properties with:

body.theme-NAMEOFCSSFILE

Hopefully the developers have a look at this and work through their lunch and sort this for us !!! 

We are exclusively using smartermail for our email and you would think we would have the best experience but doesnt feel like it