

We need to talk about email clients. - bensummers
http://inessential.com/2010/01/16/email_init

======
there
this is a perfect example of a project that will go nowhere.

 _The app would need not just coders but testers, designers, documentation
writers, bloggers, at least one project manager, and so on. It would need a
bug tracker. Repository. Wiki. Website. It will need a name. (I started a
Twitter account, which I’ll turn over to whoever leads this once we know who
that person is.)_

oh my. surely a twitter account is needed for a successful open source
project, right?

no, it needs none of those. write some code, put it up on github, let people
hack on it, /then/ setup that stuff if you still need it.

trying to create a new piece of software (especially something as large as an
e-mail client) by committee is a terrible idea. everyone will have opinions,
they'll throw them into the hat, nobody will agree on anything, nobody will
write any code, and the project will go nowhere. but hey it has a logo and a
wiki and a "project manager" so that's useful, right?

a better idea would be to take an existing client like thunderbird, mutt, etc.
and figure out what you don't like about it. i'd wager anything you don't like
can be easily changed in the source code or even coded up as an add-on for
thunderbird. i have a hard time believing the entire thing has to be redone
from scratch.

~~~
samdk
The biggest problem, I think, is that there's no vision. He says we need a
better email client, but we don't know what he thinks better means.

We don't even know what he doesn't like about existing clients.

Even if this project _does_ manage get started, it will almost certainly turn
out to be something completely different than what he's imagining.

~~~
there
_The biggest problem, I think, is that there's no vision._

from experience, open source developers don't like writing code to someone
else's vision; it feels like work. they write code to solve their own
problems, according to their own vision. if their vision correlates with an
existing project's, then all the better, and they can just work on that
project. if not, they start their own. nobody's going to sign up for a mailing
list and crank out code just because someone else is asking for it.

------
jaaron
Uh... Did I miss the part where he explained what was wrong with existing
clients? Without a clear, specific problem to solve, this is going to be an
exercise in wasted time.

I was looking over the mailing list and just about everything I see mentioned
can be done with Mutt (or Sup). Personally, I use gnus on emacs. Add in some
org-mode magic and you have just about everything anyone could ask for (well,
search is not as nice as I'd like it).

~~~
rudle
sup++

I just wish it was faster (on large mailboxes) and more stable. I'm stuck on
gmail for now.

<http://sup.rubyforge.org/>

~~~
samstokes
I'd love to try sup, but the incompatibility with other email clients makes it
a non-starter for me. At minimum I need to use my phone's mail client without
sup having to rebuild its index every time.

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scott_s
Gmail has everything I want from email. I consider email to be a solved
problem.

~~~
samdk
I almost agree. Gmail has everything _I_ want in email, but it's tied to
Google. You can (and I do) use your own domains with Google, but you still
have to go through them.

Is that a problem for me right now? No, not really. Might it become a problem
in the future? Maybe, although probably not for a while. Is it a problem for
some people? Yes.

~~~
kylec
What we _do_ need is an open-source webmail implementation like GMail.
SquirrelMail just doesn't cut it anymore.

~~~
olefoo
Roundcube is slightly better.

Zimbra is definitely better if you're willing to put up with it's overhead.

But really, email is one of those things, where your preferences are unlikely
to be the same as those of others.

------
thinkbohemian
Color me naive, but doesn't an open source email client already exist, i'm
pretty sure its called Thunderbird ... <http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-
US/thunderbird/>

Am i missing the point of the post?

~~~
ThinkWriteMute
Yes, you are. Thunderbird is a e-mail client that attempts to please the
"masses". You may have noticed but the "masses" aren't developers, they aren't
coders, they aren't testers, or designers.

They send e-mails to mother's web-tv, tell their boss they're sick, and talk
to Nigerian princes.

~~~
nzmsv
Honestly, I can't think of anything I need that Thunderbird doesn't do. IMAP
support? Yup, and the offline support works great too. Search got awesome in
the new version. Calendar is supported with Lightning, and works well with
Google Calendar. Multiple languages and encodings? Also just works.

So what if it can also be used by non-technical people? If you want something
with more geek cred, set up emacs to do your email. Otherwise just write an
extension to Thunderbird that implements whatever functionality it's currently
missing. There is no need for more fragmentation.

~~~
Vivtek
It's not all that easy to write an extension. The threshold effort is
enormous.

So for all practical intents and purposes, I can't define my own mail
categories (tags, whatever), and I can't specify a simple script to run when
something comes in, and I can't access my mail as a database for bulk
processing.

I still use Thunderbird, of course, and have for years - but these are the
things I periodically try to figure out in it, and I always end up entirely
stymied. To the point where I've also seriously considered writing my own
email client, if it just exposed its guts to Python or Perl or something.

~~~
nzmsv
I'd still say adding just one feature to an already working client is less
work than writing one from the ground up. It's easy to think you can just grab
a library to do IMAP. But what about attachments? Encodings? HTML mail?
Storage? Search? Remember, all these will need a UI of some sort. And this is
just the tip of the iceberg.

Thunderbird 3.0 has custom tags. OpenOffice eats Thunderbird address books and
can do mail merge. The one thing that's left is running a script when a
message is received. That is actually a good idea for an extension.

------
billpg
Clever satire on open source projects that go nowhere.

(If its not a satire, sorry.)

~~~
tshtf
It doesn't appear to be a satire.

Mailing list: <http://lists.ranchero.com/pipermail/email-init-ranchero.com/>

Twitter: <http://twitter.com/emailinit>

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jasonlbaptiste
Every couple of months I probably leave a comment here something like this:

Where is the "tweetdeck of email"? Columns, filtered lists, simple, and cross
OS compliant. Let me plug in my IMAP info, then start creating columns based
upon filters, people,etc. Make writing a message more like writing a tweet, so
that things are more orientated towards being short. Give me some social
context about the person similar to Xobni.

~~~
scott_s
What you're describing isn't really email any longer. It sounds more like
Google Wave.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
sure it is. it's just a semi different way of visualizing it. I'm not talking
about real-time updating and all the crazy stuff google wave does. I think the
columns concept of tweetdeck works well, and it might make sense for email.

~~~
scott_s
We discussed Google Wave a few days back:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048227>

It sounds to me like it solves your problems; it certainly helped the author
of that post.

------
callahad
For anyone looking at this and wondering about the process of starting an open
source project, I humbly recommend reading Karl Fogel's _Producing Open Source
Software._

It's CC-SA 3.0, and available at <http://producingoss.com/>

------
Vivtek
Can someone help me understand why the poster's first requirement is that this
be a Cocoa app? Honest question; it's just tossed out there as though it were
obvious and I have no idea why.

~~~
Niccodes
Brent Simmonds is a Mac developer and there's been a discussion about the Mac
email client landscape brewing for a while. The Coccoa requirement is due to
the unstated context that we're talking about an email client for Mac OS X.

By shipping Mail with every Mac, Apple basically makes it impossible for
someone else to come along and compete with a commercial product. Thunderbird,
while a fantastic piece of work, doesn't behave quite like a Mac-native
application. By saying it's got to be Coccoa, Brent's saying it has to be
through-and-though Mac-like.

------
bluesmoon
I have to agree with many who've commented here. The author doesn't list a
single problem with current email clients, except maybe that he hints at
wanting one with keyboard accessibility rather than requiring a mouse. Either
he has no idea what's available (in which case, he should search first), or he
hasn't really thought about what he wants in an email client.

Regarding what he considers obvious: \- Cocoa? I have no idea why Cocoa would
be obvious. Surely an email client for developers would need to run on at
least Windows, Linux and Mac OSX since there are enough developers that use
each of these. \- IMAP only? Good idea, but that's really the easiest part of
the problem. I'd say defer this to fetchmail to start with and just read from
a local directory. Add actual IMAP support once you've figured out the UI.
That's the real hard part. \- twitter account? yeah. 'nuff said.

The biggest problem with email today is not that a client doesn't exist to
satisfy your needs. Every developer I've met does in fact have at least one
email client that satisfies all their requirements. For some it's thunderbird,
for others it's gnus or mutt or pine, others like gmail, still others like
Mail.app, and believe it or not, there are actually developers who like MS
Outlook or Entourage. No, the biggest problem with email is that trust isn't
yet built into it. PGP/GPG/DKIM/Authenticated SMTP, and others exist, but the
majority of email users have no idea what these are or how to use them, and
unless every email user in the world switches to using some kind of trusted
authentication system, email will stay the way it is today.

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bensummers
See also discussion thread on the new mailing list.

[http://lists.ranchero.com/pipermail/email-init-
ranchero.com/...](http://lists.ranchero.com/pipermail/email-init-
ranchero.com/2010-January/thread.html)

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ThinkWriteMute
I agree with the post that there needs to be a developer specific e-mail
client, open source and designed from the ground up.

I disagree on: * Cocoa specific design * IMAP based specs * The community
tools he's using. This is a perfect project for librelist.

------
moe
Would you like champagne with your happy meal, too?

