    I have been playing with this all day (although I admittidly know NOTHING about CSS, but was able to figure enough out just playing with the file). I discovered a few things throughout this, about interface considerations.
    There are 3 ways to handle the email and header display. The current way, which I think we all agree is less than ideal. Another way that is easy enough to implement with CSS, is to have just the headers and message be inside a scroll page (basically, make messageframe scroll). This works fairly well, except that normally email clients keep the headers visible at all times. The final way, having the headers always visible while the message scrolls, appears to be very difficult to implement in CSS, and also has one very serious flaw.
    Currently, RoundCube always shows the entire sent/received/cc list for an email. I have already had a few emails that were sent to large groups and take up over half the page with this header. If you implement the design where the header always shows and just the message scrolls, some emails could be unreadable because of such long headers. So, this brings up a few other options.
    Personally, I feel that the ideal (but I don't know about ease of implementation), is to have the header only show 1 line of Subject, Sender, Copy, and Date by default, and then be able to expand the header by clicking on a button (this is similiar to how Thunderbird functions). This would allow the header always visible + message scrolling method to be easier to implement (you will at least have a better idea to how large the header is going to be), and also makes sure the email will always be readable.
    If we consider that to be too difficult, or not the way you want it, it is very easy to make the whole messageframe scroll, and I went ahead and attached the mail.css file I created that will demonstrate this behavior (I works great in firefox, but I have no clue what needs to be done to make it work in IE). Maybe if nothing else, this would be a good solution for now, until you have time to implement the ideal.

Rob

P.S. I fixed an alignment issue, the top of the headers weren't lining up like they should, it was off by 10 pixels. Changing line 406 of mail.css from:
top: 70px;
to
top: 60px;
Fixes this alignment issue.

Justin Frydman wrote:

I will play with it more right now and see If I can get it to mimic what you want.

Justin

On 10/18/05, Thomas Bruederli <roundcube@gmail.com> wrote:
Justin Frydman wrote:
>>  1) When you are reading an email message, could it be in a scroll-box
>>  like your inbox, instead of the whole webpage scrolling?  I think it
>>  looks better, is more consistant, and keeps the menus in view.
>
> This is a simple fix.
>
> edit skins/default/mail.css
>
> find
>
>
> #messagebody
> {
>   min-height: 300px;
>   margin-top: 10px;
>   margin-bottom: 50px;
>   background-color: #FFFFFF;
>   border: 1px solid #cccccc;
>   border-top: none;
> }
>
> change to:
>
>
> #messagebody
> {
>   height: 300px;
>   overflow: auto;
>   margin-top: 10px;
>   margin-bottom: 50px;
>   background-color: #FFFFFF;
>   border: 1px solid #cccccc;
>   border-top: none;
> }
>
> where  300px is how big you want your message window before scrollbars
> appear. Tested in latest versions of Firefox, IE and Opera.

I see, this is no problem but I'd like to have the scrollable message
window scaled to the maximum space available (depends on the current
window size) before start scrolling. And this is what makes it difficult
because we don't know exactly how much space the headers will take and
if you set height:100% it'll take 100% of the window which is too much.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Justin
>
Thomas

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