Hi,

I'm postiing my concerns, issues and experiences with Zoho Mail to start some discussions.

I've experienced these issues on a MacBook Pro using the latest Safari. 

And I didn't try it with other browsers because it is my primary browser and I don't wanna switch between two different browsers just because my e-mail client doesn't work properly. It should.

1. Neglecting desktop users

This is a major mistake. The assumption that everybody's moving to mobile is a massive misconception. Even if PC sales are declining at the moment it doesn't mean that every PC (and by PC I mean a presonal computer or a laptop) owner will throw her/his hardware away and switch to mobile platform. The PC will stay with us for a while and ignoring the large user base sitting at a PC is pure arrogance.

2. Design and layout

The new design is everything but fit for desktop, if I'd be a paying business customer I'd probably have at least two strokes by now.

Unfortunately, flat design is trendy even if it's awful. Even more unfortunate jumping on the bandwagon to be trendy even on the cost of losing usability and functionality

Icons

If you're replacing text with visual metaphores you should be very careful crafting those icons because they must be easy to recognise. Well, I'm sitting at a 24 inch HQD display and some of the icons are barely recognisable, I had to rely on tooltip to figure out what that specific set of pixels supposed to represent. Not to mention the icons when composing an e-mail. The Reply and the Reply to All are probably the most important actions when answering e-mails yet they're almost identical and so easy to mix them, which could have disasterous consequences. This is bad design. Yes, I've found the text version of these icons at the bottom of the e-mal preview panel. Unfortunately, they.re barely separatable from the rest of the e-mail because there's literaly nothing indicates that they are actualy actions and not part of the e-mail or just ornaments. This is a fundamental issue with flat/minimalistic design.

Layout

Fixed layout, in 2016. I was amazed by this design decision when I tested it first and I still am. It's a web page and you can do whatever you want and you decided to go with fixed layout.

Losing all the fexibility and customizability what made Zoho Mail a much better e*mail client than gmail (I've evaluated Zoho for a while before I switched to it from gmail because it's design wasn't driven by the idiotic idea of "minimalize functionality because users are morons"). I'm really disappointed.

Here's what's lost:

Tabs

I could have several tabs open (inbox, compose mail, compose an other mail based on an open document in another tab) and it was very easy and straightforward to navigate. It's all gone, now all we have is some tiny-tiny icons on the oppsite side of the window with a close button so close to the icon that it's very easy to accidentally close it (because there's no warning or confirmation, unless I put something in the message body, because giving a recipient and setting the subject is apparently doesn'n make it qualified for a close confirmation).

Paging

Instead of paging now we have infinity scrolling. What a wonderful way of wasting memory and other resources!

I know it's popular and there are several techniques to decrease resource consumption but completely abandoning paging is a mistake, again. Not to mention that the usual keys (home, end, page up, page down) doesn't have any affect at all while some (up, down) has a bad side effect (they're jumping to the previous or next e-mail) and open the e-mail viewer panel, display the e-mail and mark the e-mail as read. Bad behaviour, bad design.

Navigation type (scrolling vs paging) should be user selectable, at least on desktop.

E-mail preview panel

It's location can't be customized. Which is very unfortunate because I alwas used a stacked layout instead of a side-by-side layout. Again, removing customizability. It's a shame.

3. Lost information

The old version provided a threaded vew of long e-mail conversions and it clearly showed the information/conversion flows with thin lines. Which is sometimes very important. Now it's gone and we have this flattened, conversation-style view. And so, now this kind of information is lost, or, at least it's really hard to trace back. A disappointment, again.

4. Incomplete information

The old version displayed the total number of e-mails in Inbox, etc. Now, there's stuff like "99+". Awesome. But why "99+", why not "23+" or "many". Again, the new client provides less information than the old one. This is ridiculous.

5. Search

Sometimes it doesn't return the correct result, some e-mail are missing.

Even if I find manually the e-mail and then I select the "List emails from the contact" in the preview panel, the list from the same contact doesn't include the very same e-mail from the contact I invoked the action. I've never experienced anything like this with the old version.

Clearly a bug.

Also, the search Refine is confusing:

- there's the checkbox to select All/None/Unread/... to perform selection but no search performed yet (but I can perform the selection - on the folder in the background)

- the little arrows doesn't work in the "IN FOLDER", "IN DATE RANGE", etc. comboBoxes. They are a clear visual indicator that the given control is a combobox so one should expect to get a list of options clicking on the arrow but nothing happens. It take some time to realize that I have to click on the text. Misleading, bad design.

6. All/None/Unread/... checkbox can't select more that 200 e-mails. Where is this limitation comes from? Why 200? Why not 99 or 256? Completely puzzled by these decisions....

7. Refresh/sync issues

Sometimes I need to refresh manually by reloading the page itself to get new e-mails. Also, it's not refreshing if the screen is turned off adter the period set in Energy Saver (but going to slepp is disabled when the display turned off so all applications keep working)

Zoho Mail's not syncing between multiple instances (one at home and one at the office, for example)

8. Document display

If I have a document open and switching between document/inbox/etc., when I switch to the document panel, it ALWAYS scrolls to the top. Very annoying. And, to be fair, this is not a new issue...

Update #01

1. Check items with the checkbox and then click on any item (it doesn't matter if the associated checkbox is checked or unchecked)  : all the checkboxes turned off. Completely unexpected behaviour, a simple selection change shouldn't affect the checked state.

2. Pointless action...

To reproduce:

- from the checkbox select All

- " 25 emails selected" and " Select all messages matching the current view"

- click on " Select all messages matching the current view"

- " All Emails selected" and " Clear selection"

Now, you can't do anything meaningful (like move to a different folder) except delete the checked items or " Clear selection" which returns to an unchecked list of e-mail. I just can't figure out what was the idea behind it...

Edit: I just realized I can use the Folder option to move a specific folder so it's kind of works but the drag'n'drop option is disabled. Is there any reason for that, I wonder...

Edit: OK, I tested it and it doesn't work if I select all e-mails (" Select all messages matching the current view"). These little things are pretty annoying...

Best regards,

Imre