Neither of those examples actually look useful, the fix is definitely more easy on the eyes though. The empty space between the rows of email messages seems unnecessarily big. I get this was done for design's sake, and yes it looks 'pretty' and 'light' in the flat minimalistic way, and otherwise you'd have this dense chunk of the screen. I still think having twice (or comparing to mine, even three times more) the emails displayed on a per row basis makes scanning for things easier at a glance.
That fix actually resembles something I do to websites, ad-blocking away all the unnecessary elements, siderails, wrappers, navbars, footers, etc. It's very cathartic spending a few seconds resculpting a website to reveal only the relevant content. And the end result always convinces me that less is more when it comes to web design, that regular text and simple formatting should be prioritized higher.