It has been noticed in the early usability tests of the new Elastic skin that mail composing page is not very user friendly. We noted quite a lot of different issues there. I started working on these and this includes quite a significant change to the page layout.
In the beginning there was no contacts widget in mail composer, but it has been added on user request into the Classic and Larry skins later. When porting that to Elastic I didn’t think much about it. After some thought I decided to try displaying the contact selection list only when it is needed.
So, there will be only two sections in the layout now. The contact selection/inserting dialog will be invoked by the button on the right side of the email address input (2.) This will give us cleaner and simple layout.
The functionality to attach contact’s vCard (via vcard_attachments plugin) will also change. It will use the same contact selection dialog invoked by an additional button (1.). Here’s how the dialog will look like.
There’s of course more issues that I’m going to work on next, but I first wanted to hear some opinions about this quite heavy change. This is definitely something I want to cover before the official stable release. What do you think?
Kolabian 
When I look to my behavior during last 5 years using different email clients I never used the contacts list or widget to find an emal address. I just type the name in the To vor CC field and hope that autofill works.
The only use case I have using a contacts list is when creating distribution lists. Which is a pain in the ass with Kolab due to the fact that you can not use contacts from global address book in such lists.
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Yes, that’s my case too. I’ve never used the contact list or widget to search for a contact. I just start typing and the contact pops up right away.
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