

Alex Payne: The Problem With Email Clients - mqt
http://al3x.net/2009/02/08/the-problem-with-email-clients.html

======
derefr
Why _can't_ web browsers allow drag-and-drop? Why haven't we seen any
innovation in DOM-addressable UI controls since HTML3? The obvious impedance
is starting to get to me whenever I fire up Safari on my iPhone and notice
that none of the input fields use the right keyboard layout. It would be
obvious to refactor <input type="text"> and <input type="password"> into
<input type="text" inputscheme="prose"> and <input type="text"
inputscheme="password">, and then add <input type="text"
inputscheme="phonenumber"> and such on top of that. Why can't we do things
like that?

~~~
Hexstream
Well, for one thing, phone numbers are in different formats in different
locales.

~~~
bvttf
But they're usually still _numbers_. It could also be a hint to pull from an
address book or autofill.

~~~
access_denied
Uh, oh, no. Look, this is my number out of my adress book: +49 (2141) 567 07
68

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glymor
The advantage of desktop email is you control it. The server doesn't get to
decide how it should be displayed, routed or filtered.

Why are people willing to relinquish control over something they use so much?
I could understand if you are not technical: gmail brings things that have
been in mutt for years to the masses. But this is Hacker News whats "hacker"
about google deciding everything?

I find this annoying about HN as well, if this was usenet we wouldn't have to
ask for features like notification of replies or kill lists we would have them
already or have the control required to do them ourselves. RMS is right the
whole cloud thing is a major step back it's walled us off from the backend.

~~~
tdavis
You might be surprised and/or horrified by the number of "hackers" who know
nothing of things like Usenet, IRC, mutt, etc. I think it really hit me when
someone posed the serious question, "What's IRC?" He was older than me.

Don't get me started on "the cloud", either. Back in my day, we had to walk up
hill, both ways, in the snow, to setup a mail server. And even then it didn't
work.

------
timf
" _Anyone who’s given Gmail a fair shake will quickly find conversations
indispensable. Going back to any other email client is agonizing and
disorienting,_ "

No. It really depends. At work, where for me a thread might last for weeks and
have 5-10 participants, the _only_ thing that makes any sense is a
hierarchical threaded view where you can see who replied to what (I use Claws
Mail).

Gmail conversations cannot contextually distinguish where the tangents are
that you must treat as new sub-threads (you cannot just say "rename the
subject" because that is not what people do in real life).

(I've been using both claws and gmail for 5+ years)

~~~
moe
Yup, that's the first thing I wondered, too. How does gmail cope with mailing
lists? Just stitching every post of a thread one after another?

~~~
timf
Yeah. So some conversations will have "(97)" next to them and you're SOL.

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zacharypinter
I think it's time for a new email protocol. IMAP is far too slow and lacks
tagging. POP doesn't synchronize read/unread status (or anything else).

There's an interesting opportunity here for building a web service on top of
email that would allow for more robust client-side applications in addition to
a web interface. However, I wouldn't want to invest too much time into the
idea at the risk of Gmail coming up with their own streamlined API.

~~~
briansmith
IMAP has tagging: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501#section-2.3.2>.

------
thwarted
"Gmail presents email threads as one long conversation, starting with the
oldest message and ending with the most recent."

Oddly, Gmail encourages top-posting, which it makes up for by decent (although
not fool proof) hiding of quoted content in subsequent messages.

------
mmc
OK, so in six months, four new mail clients will have conversation view and
Apple will add it once those have some success. But how many will be hackable?

In my view, the real problem with email clients (that aren't emacs) is that I
have no good way of _hacking_ the filtering, display, and handling of my
messages.

------
ThomPete
I don't really like gmail. I do like my mail client.

It's not just drag and drop of files thats the issue, it's the multiple drag
and drop or batch, thats the issue.

So until then i stay with a mail client and then can live with webmail access
if I am not with my machine.

Regarding RIA though he is way off IMHO. RIA is here to stay and will continue
to deliver new possible experiences, but so far in most heavy areas, web apps
simply don't compete with a real desktop app

------
anatoli
I'm not a gmail user, but "organize by thread" in Mail.app sounds a hell of a
lot like "conversation" view.

~~~
zacharypinter
Conversation view in Mail.app is nice, but it really only threads the messages
in your inbox (or current folder). Gmail's threads are a bit nicer since it'll
grab all the related messages even if they've already been archived.

~~~
thwarted
That's part of the real power of gmail's mail handling methods. Like POP (and
the concept of "delete or keep on server"), a message can "logically" only
exist in one place at a time. IMAP can move/copy messages, but if the same
message exists in multiple places, they appear as two distinct messages. In
gmail, the message only appears in one place, the single, massive mail store.
How things are tagged, er I mean labeled, determine your view on them. Since
labels don't move or copy things, they are available to be pulled into
different views without breaking a concept of different storage locations. The
fact that IMAP works reasonably well on top of gmail's labeling is impressive.

------
newt0311
Progress in software....

Is it just me or is it that most progress nowadays seems to be just
rediscovering features that old specialized apps like emacs have had for
decades now?

Seriously, conversations... GNUS has had that for ages and it is a _very_ nice
feature.

~~~
paul
At a sufficiently high level, everything is old. However, for real products,
the details matter a lot. Just because X is conceptually similar to Y does not
mean that they are the same, or that the difference is unimportant.

Threading has been around forever, but I don't think any other email client
has Gmail's "conversation view" (I'm kind of surprised that nobody has copied
it yet, actually).

