
Ask HN: What are you missing in existing email clients? - rasmusei
I&#x27;m wondering both about <i>features</i> and <i>quality</i>. Personally, I dislike most of the desktop clients not for a lack of features, but for a lack of quality. Too often, UIs are clunky, or IMAP syncing doesn&#x27;t work well, or search is dissatisfactory.<p>I should not be priming you more, but just ask: What features and qualities are you missing? What would make you try another client? What are absolute must-haves in terms of features?
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Nadya
Folders that display their subfolders content. This problem is very inherently
noticeable in Outlook while at work. There are 5 types of problems sent to 1
team distro. I filter these 5 types of problems, based on the Subject field,
to a different subfolder of the team distro folder. When I view the team
distro folder - I don't see any email. I need to click into the individual
subfolders. If I create a Search Folder (which will let me see all search
results from these 5 folders, effectively being what I want) it needs to be a
Top Level folder and cannot, itself, be a Subfolder or reorganized. It will
live under the Search Folders menu effectively thwarting my attempts at
organization.

I would like to only be notified of new email that enters specific folders -
rather than just an on/off where I am spammed with dozens if not hundreds of
desktop notifications I do not care for. This way I don't need to keep my
email always-visible to see when I get important email.

I would like extremely flexible organizational rules, again similar to
Outlook.

All in a UI that gets out of my way and works well in portrait mode, as the
few emails I get tend to be more longform and I like to reduce scrolling. I
actually like Mailbird's [0] UI because I prefer icons over text labels for a
tool I'm using frequently. Terrible UX (what do all these icons mean?) is
something I'm willing to overcome as a power user. Using email/webmail clients
reminds me of using IE6 with several toolbars installed to the point where I
see more of IE's UI than I do the webpage I'm trying to browse. When I read
emails I feel like I see more email client than I do email and that's
aggravating.

[0] [https://www.getmailbird.com](https://www.getmailbird.com)

~~~
rasmusei
Thanks for the detailed reply.

I sort of understand the design decision in Outlook to make the search folders
a separate (and flat?) tree. What behavior would you expect from operations
like copy, search if you put a search folder inside another (physical) folder?
Anyway, I'm sure there are sensible ways to do what you're asking for, but it
opens up questions about what a "folder" is and should be. Very interesting.

Notification settings agreed! I always turned all of the notifications off
when I had Outlook.

Portrait mode, OK. Many email clients do give some few options for various
horizontal/vertical splits. Are the options in Outlook enough in that respect?

~~~
Nadya
This ended up being quite wordy and I'm still not sure I explained my issue
properly. I might need to do a visual mockup of my problem which boils down to
"mental disconnect between the source of the data and where you view the
data".

I want all Children Folder contents to be visible from a Parent Folder.
Actions would still be done to the Child folder the email actually exists
inside of - the Parent folder is for presentation purposes only. This is
basically how a Search Folder works currently.

Currently if I open up a normal `Parent` folder I will see 0 emails. If I want
to see any mail I need to visit a `Parent/Child` folder that the mail is
filtered into. But what I really want, sometimes, is to see _all_ of my
`Parent/Child` emails in a single, flat view. Folders are great for organizing
the past but are really bad for the "now".

To build off my earlier example (re: one distro = five problems) I want to
keep these five problems filtered into their own folders for easier
organization/finding when other people reference them. However, since I need
to solve these problems as they are emailed in I want to watch a `Parent`
folder. I can't do this because the `Parent` folder says it has no emails. I
can only see email if I look at a `Parent/Child` folder, but now I can't see
any email going to the other four `Parent/Child` folders. While watching the
`Parent` folder I can see that `Parent/Child` has new unread emails - but now
I'm forced to change my folder location panel to the Child folder in order to
view and read this unread email. This is different from how a Search Folder
works. In a Search Folder, I can continue to see all searched emails while
browsing one in the reading panel.

I can see all of them at once by creating a 'Search' folder that searches each
`Parent/Child` and displays the result of its search but why can't that Search
Folder just be `Parent`? Why does it need to be `/Search Folders/Distro
Trasks/`? If `/Parent/` was a search folder that could exist anywhere in the
folder tree and works exactly like search folders currently work that'd be
_perfect_.

The TL;DR of the entire problem is that `Parent` should just act like a Search
Folder of it's Children instead of being completely useless. I don't want a
flat structure - due to organizational/archiving purposes - but I do want a
flat structure _some_ of the time for handling email in the present time.

 _> Portrait mode, OK. Many email clients do give some few options for various
horizontal/vertical splits. Are the options in Outlook enough in that
respect?_

Yes. Existing options that many clients use where the navigation panel and the
reading panel are horizontally split instead of vertically split suffice.

~~~
kbenson
> I want all Children Folder contents to be visible from a Parent Folder.
> Actions would still be done to the Child folder the email actually exists
> inside of - the Parent folder is for presentation purposes only. This is
> basically how a Search Folder works currently.

I seem to remember Thunderbird having saved searches that worked as folders,
and they should work in this manner. Does Outlook have a way to save a search
like that? It's not ideal, as you have to set it up and it isn't necessarily
in the same spot as what it's searching to make it obvious what it is, but it
might be better than nothing. If you can't set subfolder display order,
creating a saved search of all the relevant subfolders as "0 - Combined View"
as a subfolder itself that sorts to the top might get you most the way there.

~~~
Nadya
Yes, a 'saved search' is a Search Folder.

 _> it isn't necessarily in the same spot as what it's searching to make it
obvious what it is_

That's exactly my problem! Search folders are unable to be relocated or act as
parent folders.

------
sbinthree
I want webmail that is ruthlessly simple. I don't care about: flags,
importance, message status, categories, conversations, etc. Just show me the
sender, subject line and date and when I click it, the message. I wish there
was more/better scripting / automation tools (ie. if contains "unsubscribe"
then archive). Basically I want Gmail but faster load time and better "rules".

~~~
kbenson
That sounds like most the old webmail clients of yesteryear, except for speed.
Squirrelmail was pretty bare bones, but worked. Beating Gmail for speed is
going to be hard unless you work with some non-traditional backing storage.

If you really, _really_ want speed, simplicity (beyond initial learning curve
at least) and access, getting access to a host that allows shell access, has
mutt and screen or tmux installed, and accepts mail delivery would hit all
your points as long as a SSH session is doable. Screen/tmux keep the client
open when you are disconnected to speed (no need to scan a few hundred MB or
couple GB of messages in mbox or Maildir format), and mutt will be as fast and
configurable as you can imagine (plus you generally get procmail).

If you're actually interested in that and don't want to run your own mail
server, sonic.com (used to be sonic.net) has free shell accounts for
customers, and they have non internet services you can sign up for still I
think (such as hosting). In any case, you can just call or email support and
tell them you are looking for a shell account to read your email and they
might hook you up with a shell account for a couple bucks a month.

------
cimmanom
I've used Apple's mail.app for over a decade now and don't think anything else
matches its handling of multiple accounts (all the other clients I've tried
try to keep the accounts too separate). For reference, I've got 8 active
accounts at the moment.

Unfortunately, it's increasingly buggy in increasingly problematic ways, and
Apple appears to have zero interest in fixing it.

So I'd love to see a client that works like that for multiple accounts (with
support for both POP and IMAP) and has all of Apple Mail's features but isn't
broken.

The other things I want, but that wouldn't be enough on its own to get me to
switch, would be:

1) a way to apply multiple tags to a single message, and filter by tag

2) add private notes to a message or thread

------
laumars
I really hate Electron in general but I've really found an affinity for
Mailspring. So much so that I'd actually go as far as saying it's the only
email client I've genuinely liked (rather than tolerated). So highly recommend
it in spite of the larger footprint it carries compared to fully native.

As an aside note, it supports Gmail and other proprietary cloud mailboxes - if
just due to its being Electron based - so theres no more messing about with
IMAP et al for Gmail

