Neat Messages for Gmail

No more long and annoying lines of text in Gmail

2 followers

No more long and annoying lines of text in Gmail

2 followers

Neat Messages for Gmail is a Chrome Extension that puts plain text emails in a neat container where you can comfortably read them. In the meantime, HTML emails that are designed and have everything looking nice will be left unchanged.

Launch tags:Chrome Extensions•User Experience•Tech

Launch Team

ClarifyThe autonomous CRM that helps you sell more

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Maker

Hello, people! 👋 I was recently frustrated with how the default look of messages in Gmail consists of long lines of text. Where else do you see this? Product Hunt - no, Twitter - nah, Facebook - nope, Medium - nono... Before I went to bed the other day, I fiddled a bit with Gmail in the browser Inspector. I shrunk an annoyingly wide email and ended up with the thing being easier to read. So I created this extension. It watches when you’ll open an email and checks if it’s a plain text one, meaning if it’s *not* already styled by the sender (a.k.a. HTML emails). If it’s just a regular email, it adds the following swag to it: - Maximum width of 510px (about the same as a Tweet) - Centered in the middle of the screen - Border with a slight shadow in sync with Gmail’s design - Font size of 14px with 20px line height (same as a Tweet) with low CSS specificity so that explicit styles can affect the content The extension does *not* change the content itself, only its presentation. HTML emails are pleasant and easy to read because they’re styled. My goal is to make plain text emails a bit like them. I hope it improves your reading experience. I’d like to hear what you think! 🙂

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8yr ago

@dodov This is awesome! I was actually working on something similar which transforms gmail threads into a chat like experience.

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6yr ago

Maker

Features to come: 🔤 Control over the alignment of text (for people very used to seeing it on the left) ✨ Restyling of the reply composer (not the popup composer on the bottom right, but the one below a conversation); this way, writing experience will be improved alongside the reading experience 🐛 Currently, there’s a bug where replying in a conversation will result in your newest message being unstyled until the browser is refreshed; will be fixed ❌ (Probably) a tiny button somewhere in the container that allows you to revert back to the original styling of the mail, in case something is not displayed correctly What do you think about those? 🤔 Have any suggestions? I’m open to anything! 📖 EDIT: Those features (except the last one) + minor bugfixes are live! 🙂

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8yr ago

@hristiyandodov Oops! I just read this, I forgot to scroll over. Yes, please. The control of changing the alignment would be useful.

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8yr ago

LOVE IT. Excellent work. The Gmail team needs to listen-up and drop this feature in. Could you offer a toggle switch so we can quickly see emails in their unaltered states. Sometimes it's important to see emails the same way others do?

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8yr ago

Maker

@searchresults Yep, that’s one of the features I’d like to implement. 👍 A tiny button somewhere that offers the unaltered look of the message.

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8yr ago

This extension deserves a trophy, very useful. It just works, yes. But I would suggest moving the block to the left instead of having it on the center. And maybe the option to remove the background/border, just have it to change the width of the email. :)

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8yr ago

Maker

@welvinrc At first it did only that, yes. But then I decided to put it in the center and style it as a box so it could look more like an HTML email. And if it looks like one, well, there will be more consistency with emails because all of them will be in a centered box. Your argument is completely valid, though! 👍 And I’m going to make the extension customizable. It’s purpose is to make reading emails more pleasant after all, not to make them look a certain way. Thank you very much for the feedback! 🙌

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8yr ago

@welvinrc @hristiyandodov see. More people are telling you. 😉

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8yr ago

Maker

@welvinrc I updated the extension. Now you can control whether the messages are centered and whether they’re in a box. 🙂 Simply update to version 1.2.0 and go to the Options page. Thank you for the feedback and I hope you find the changes useful! 🙌

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8yr ago

@hristiyandodov Super Neat!! Thank you for the update.

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8yr ago

A valid idea and wonderfully executed. Will wait to see more features coming in soon. @hristiyandodov's ideas are really good. ✌️ 🌟

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8yr ago

Maker

@arunsathiya Thank you very much for those words, Arun! 🙌

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8yr ago