Difference between selected and unread e-mails still not easily noticeable

[docjochim]

Checklist

• I have used the search function to see if someone else has already submitted the same feature request.
• I will describe the problem with as much detail as possible.
• This issue only contains a request for one single feature, not multiple (related) features.

App version

8.0

Problem you are trying to solve

Marked mails have nearly the same grey than unread messages.

Suggested solution

Is there any possibility to change marked mails' colour to get them distinguishly different from the unread messages' grey?

Screenshots / Drawings / Technical details

No response

[docjochim]

Sorry - I just saw I slided into thunderbird...
My issue had to point at k9mail for android.

[kewisch]

No worries, K-9 Mail and Thunderbird for Android have the same base code. We did make a few tweaks in #8387 but it still seems to be a common complaint.

[lewri]

Just to add a note -- it looks like dark mode will distinguish between read and unread fine in my opinion. This is probably because it uses a regular grey and black

click to expand

Light theme is distinguishable to my eyes but I can see the problem.

click to expand

Screenshot below from Gmail actually has the same issue with the white and grey thing, so it's not just specifically an issue to K9/Thunderbird:

[Agreborig]

Just my thoughts on this: In the recent past I wondered why in the messenger Signal the unread messages are not good distinguishable in comparison to WhatsApp. My conclusion was, that in WhatsApp the continues colored dot with the number of new messages and the colored date of the message makes the huge difference. So you can literally swipe the fastest you can through the messages and still notice the difference because you know that you just have to look to a color in the right.

click to expand

So maybe something like this could be a solution to color the date of the message if it is unread in the accent color (blue)? Of the app

[Iey4iej3]

How did you have this gray & black distinction? I do not have it on TB Android 8.0. There was such a distinction in previous K-9 Mail, but not in TB!

[Agreborig]

How did you have this gray & black distinction? I do not have it on TB Android 8.0. There was such a distinction in previous K-9 Mail, but not in TB!

You have to activate it in: Settings > General Settings > Display > Change colour when read

[bigboipete]

What's the core of the issue? The title says "read and unread", but the description talks about "marked mails...unread messages". And just to clarify: Marked is equal to selected to my understanding.

I think, the mails' color in dark mode is hardly to distinguish between marked and read (contrary to the description) mails.

The color contrast between unread to read or marked is fine for me.

All with "Settings > General Settings > Display > Change colour when read" checked.

[docjochim]

What's the core of the issue? The title says "read and unread", but the description talks about "marked mails...unread messages". And just to clarify: Marked is equal to selected to my understanding.

The title has been changed by @kewisch:

kewisch changed the title changeable colour of marked mails Difference between read and unread e-mails still not easily noticeable

I just replaced 'read' by 'selected' to clarify the colour-problem.

[mediadog]

K-9, until a recent version, used a color to mark emails so it was easily distinguishable from greyed read emails instead of both using shades of grey. Can this just be reverted? Even better give the user a choice on the shade/color.

[lewri]

How did you have this gray & black distinction? I do not have it on TB Android 8.0. There was such a distinction in previous K-9 Mail, but not in TB!

@Agreborig For some reason the quoted images didn't load but you were asking in respect to mine on looking at the URLs. These screenshots were from K9-Mail on Android 12; system theme set to dark mode (my K9 follows the system theme choice of Light or Dark).

[cketti]

Our design team is working on this.

One of the problems is that too many states are currently communicated via a background color.

• Read/unread (when enabled in settings),
• selected,
• and opened message in split-screen mode.

If we can find a way to make read and unread messages easily distinguishable without changing the background color that would make many other things much easier. One of the reasons read and unread messages (without having "Change colour when read" enabled) can be hard to distinguish is that some device vendors use default fonts where bold text looks very similar to normal text. On other devices it's quite easy to tell the difference.