We're not trying to save screen real estate as much as performance when you hit the content blob table for all those messages. To draw a preview you would be doing just as much back-end work as drawing all the content. Ideally we want to change the content expanding to Ajax and only pull a single blob.

I don't think there's a feasible amount of preview that isn't a blob -- if you get somebody like me who quotes a block before they reply, your preview would only have quoted content from each successive message up the list. Sure, you could preview starting at the first non '>' prefixed line, but then we're back to pulling 5-15 blobs on every ticket for potentially no reason.

Mike:
Yeah I could see that being important with the thought of moving to ajax on expand
Which would make gargantuan ticket pages easier to load
and we know we get gargantuan tickets a lot

Jeff:
yeah that's the goal, a huge part of opening big C3 tickets was all that pointless crap + attachments
Plus C4 just jumps to #latest from any list now and doesn't even look up
Most cases you won't need to, ESPECIALLY with 'last action' where you're fed tickets you already remember
Not playing hot potato

This has been pretty much resolved with the new ticket notes feature.