I like the dark theme but I had to switch back to the light theme because some emails are hard to read with the dark theme.

I believe the viewing pane should default to a white background and not alter the colors of an email, the theme shouldn't change the presentation of an email.

When you create, reply, or forward an email, the editor pane has a white background even with the dark theme. I believe this is the correct implementation, if the email sets the background color show it, otherwise default to white.

Most email programs that have a choice of themes for instance Outlook, the viewing pane defaults to white regardless of the theme.

I'm sure some people like the dark viewing pane, I propose adding a setting for the viewing pane so we can choose.

We tried to replicate how Windows Mail treats the dark theming of messages. When you use dark mode we do provide a "Light" you can turn on next to the email. This gives you an easy toggle to view the email in it's original format with no content modifications.

There are many many edge cases that our "dark-themify" code may not handle. If you would like you can contact support and send a copy of some of those emails and we can try to make sure we handle those cases. There are certain things we can tweak like the difference in contrast between background and foreground elements and having examples adds to our database of tests that we click through when verifying that we are correctly dark-theming messages.

EDIT: Not saving the state of this "Light" is by design since we wanted people to use in on a per email basis. With our hope being that in most emails it should not need to be used. Still open to potentially changing this behavior, just mentioning that it was our original intentions.

Matt, I think the behavior of business email clients should also have been taken into account. Microsoft choose not to have Outlook behave like Windows Mail on this topic.

While having the "Light" toggle is good, there should be a more permanent setting. Present an option for the viewing pane's background color (light/dark) when the Dark theme is selected. This should make everyone happy and is a far easier solution for you guys than having to tweak every contrast combination.

Here is an important point, with the Dark viewing pane you don't even know if you are seeing all the content of an email. For business email that is troublesome.

Here are examples of a Facebook email in Dark and Light themes, with Dark you don't even know there is a button.

I switched back to the Light Theme since the Dark viewing pane is unusable for business email.

This was a session based cookie but we have changed this to browser based so it will live beyond opening and closing the browser / webmail.  It will be in the upcoming build.

I would have liked the setting saved to the account but this is definitely an improvement.

Thanks

I agree, at least having the setting not reset after closing the browser will be nice. But I do agree with Jerry that making this an account setting would be more ideal. Very few if any of the emails I receive work without the original background of the email . The only emails that it works with are 100% textual emails, which most businesses don't do. 

On another note. In the build previous to 7488 I thought I saw that replied emails had a slightly different background in addition to the reply icon in the email list. I do like this as it makes it very easy to see if something is just not read but replied to. If it was removed, I vote to put it back. If it wasn't removed it needs a little more contrast.

Thank you,

Tim,

I installed Build 7496 which was released today. The release notes state "Added: Reading pane light/dark mode now persists between browser sessions.".

This does work and is persistent, too persistent. It affects all accounts in all domains.

The cookie should be tied to the user's account or saved on the server in the user's account.

Regards

 

Jerry,

The setting was changed from a non persistent sessionStorage object to a persistent localStorage object.  The setting itself is specific to your browser and is never sent to the server.  The end result is that if you log in with other accounts (or impersonate) with the same browser, the setting will remain the same for you (since you are still using the same browser).

Rest assured that no other users' settings are getting changed when you toggle that option on or off.

If you are trying to say that we should save it on a per-account basis in the browser, we debated that, but couldn't come up with any real scenarios that justified the additional complexity.  You'd have to keep changing the setting based on your preferences for every account you logged into.

The scenario for me is that I log into a multitude of computers and browsers. It would be nice for my preferences to follow me around. 

I just figured out that the lighter background (on the email list) is not for the "reply" icon but for the "flag" icon. Since the flag icon already has contrast feature with turning red might I suggest moving the highlight to reply or making the reply icon yellow.

Grady,

I understand the reasoning.

I'm just pointing out if more than one person uses the same browser/computer, one's preferences can affect other users. To make it unique for each user you just need append the user's primary email address (or a hash of it) to this setting's cookie name.

Eventually you should store this on the server just like the other account settings. I don't know why this is handled differently.

Thanks