After a week long battle, I completed my hack on the message list to have a hbox/vbox renderer working and with which I have made a new message column called ‘Messages’. This will have the following layout
This is a single multilined column, which helps to reduce the width of the message list, which helps to add to the width of the preview in the wide mode. I haved rendered the First line in Standard Font and the subject in Fixed width font, to make the easier to find what is the subject and who is the sender. Also I have added a gconf option to choose to show email or not in this column. It shows the attachment icon, just before the date. It supports threading in the view and it will show the expander, just before the subject and only the subject is offseted to show the thread
Also since this is a single column, sorting becomes difficult. I have added a ‘Sort By’ menu, which shows the current sort selection and gives a option to sort on a field, without having a requirement to add a new one.
Have a look at the screenshot, and let me know your suggestions/opinions on it.