
Re-Designing the classic email client - agos
http://www.vanschneider.com/work/mail/
======
podperson
Don't fix email. Fix communication.

Why, on my iPhone, do I have:

1\. An email app (which required a major update to unite mail boxes)

2\. A "messages" app (which abstracts out two different message systems)

3\. A phone app

4\. A contacts app

5\. Twitter

6\. Facebook

7\. Skype

What I want to do is (a) send messages to people (I don't care how), (b) check
messages I've received (from anyone, using any method), (c) manage my messages
(both incoming and outgoing), and -- as the writer of the article points out
-- (d) manage my attachments.

On the iPhone (which is by no means the worst case) I might end up doing
something stupid like looking up a contact, phone them, get sent to voicemail.
Go back to the contact. Use a slightly different path to send an SMS. Discover
it doesn't get sent. Switch to mail, and send a message.

Meanwhile the recipient gets a missed call, an empty voicemail, eventually
gets the SMS, and then receives an email -- in three different apps on their
iPhone.

Tiny incremental improvements to email will only nibble at the edges of the
larger problem. Let me communicate with a unified UI and unified contacts.

~~~
blhack
<snark>

In my kitchen I have:

1\. A fridge

2\. A coffee machine

3\. A stove

4\. A microwave

5\. A blender

6\. Mixing bowls

7\. Measuring cups

All I want to do is feed myself. Why on earth do I need to have so many
different things to do it?

</snark>

To...most people, having a separate "app" for things that do wildly different
things is a _good_. Skype and email fill _completely_ different roles to me,
and I suspect they fill completely different roles to other people as well.

You might want to send a message to somebody and not care how, but I _do_ care
how.

If it's late, I might send my friend an email instead of an SMS because I know
that the SMS will probably wake her up, and the email won't.

Being able to control this is a good thing.

Did you notice the descention of immediacy in your example of
phone->sms->email? You went from the most demanding contact method "stop what
you are doing and _talk_ to me!" to the middle "stop what you are doing and
read these 160 characters!" to the least "eventually look at this piece of
text".

If you didn't care as much about your message, you probably would have done
this in a different order.

If something major in my life happened (I'm having a baby! I'm going back to
school! I got into YC! Somebody is buying one of my projects!), I would _call_
my best friends to tell them, I wouldn't SMS them.

So would you.

And this is good.

~~~
koenigdavidmj
> _If it's late, I might send my friend an email instead of an SMS because I
> know that the SMS will probably wake her up, and the email won't._

That should be up to the other end to determine. I should not need to say `SMS
wakes me up, email doesn't' when they are fundamentally the same thing. That's
an implementation detail.

The right way to do this is for the _other person_ to be able to tell the
phone what they want, regardless of protocol: messages from my Nagios system
at work, or family members, should awaken me. Anything else should be ignored
until morning.

~~~
blhack
Sometimes I _do_ want my friends to wake me up in the middle of the night:

"I'm drunk, I need a ride home."

"Can I stay at your house."

"$emergency"

"Hey, I really just need somebody to talk to..."

etc. etc.

I don't want to have to go through my entire contact list, individually
setting people who can and can't wake me up at night. There is already a
mechanism for this, it's called "human interaction". My friends know who can
and can't wake me up; they know this because they're my friends.

By giving them my phone number, I'm trusting them to respect that, and only
wake me up if they need to.

~~~
dllthomas
I've been wishing there was a layer between my phone and me that said,
effectively, "You've reached David's phone - if this is an emergency or he's
expecting your call, press 1; otherwise, press 2 to set up an appointment for
a later call, or 3 leave a voicemail message." Where 2 would talk to my
calendar and ideally their calendar and figure out a time that works for both
of us without my involvement. Sure, people could just mash 1, but people
always have an option to be rude when there's interpersonal interaction going
on, and at least this way they have a way not to be rude while still reaching
out to me by phone, and a way to actually get through to me in an emergency.

~~~
wickedchicken
with gvoice, people can leave a voicemail that gets transcripted (vaguely) and
texted to me. I glance at the text and decide if I want to call them back or
not.

~~~
dllthomas
I love that capability, but it's not quite everything I want - I do want a way
for people to loudly interrupt me in the case of a genuine emergency, but I
want them to have to reaffirm that most of the time. The hands-off scheduling
would be nice, too. But for what it is, it's rad, to be sure.

------
hapless
This guy has teeny tiny letters hardcoded into JPGs on his web site. I can't
read it.

Fortunately, this means I can disregard what he has to say about UI/UX.
Sometimes the medium IS the message.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
Any other areas of your life where you throw the baby out with the bath water?

Someone over salt some food so you assume that everything they say or do with
food is wrong?

Refuse to ever get a lift with a friend because they forgot to indicate once
so obviously they can't be trusted to drive?

I'm not wild about the way he's presented his website but I'm still willing to
look at his ideas about e-mail workflow with an open mind.

~~~
smacktoward
If someone presents himself to me as a professional cook and then proceeds to
over-salt the food, yes, I do feel completely comfortable disregarding his
culinary opinions from that point forward.

~~~
dorian-graph
Where do 'mistakes' fit in in your world?

~~~
tedunangst
It's hard to accidentally turn all the text of your blog post into jpegs. It
reflects a deliberate decision (and in the opinion of people here, a poor
one).

------
rdl
I comfortably ignore any comments about email and what it should be from
anyone who hasn't used a text email client (well configured) like mutt, mh,
elm, or an emacs mode for at least 100 hours.

The only real complaints I have about email with a well-configured text client
are: * HTML mail from idiots * Syncing on multiple machines, with offline mode
(IMAP is ok, but you want to keep full repositories on laptops for use without
network, and ideally to process email more quickly than network access) *
Mobile clients -- Android has K9Mail, haven't found anything great on iOS yet.
The keyboard-based mail workflow doesn't translate to the tablet/phone form
factor, but triggers do even more so, so there should be something there *
Handling attachments well * Global directory across organizations
(FB/LinkedIn/etc. integration could help a lot) * Multi-user mailboxes; you
need some kind of ticketing/tagging/CRM on top of it, and these are all
standalone, sometimes web based, and fairly universally suck. There are ways
to tie them into plain email though.

~~~
dools
_I comfortably ignore any comments about email and what it should be from
anyone who hasn't used a text email client (well configured) like mutt, mh,
elm, or an emacs mode for at least 100 hours._

I comfortably ignore _anyone_ that says "email needs to be fixed" from clients
to the underlying system - it's awesome and nothing about it needs to change.
People just need to learn to use it better.

I run everything through gmail, but I use my own domain (via an external SMTP
server), so if gmail goes _down_ I can just route mail directly to another
machine.

I use fetchmail to POP everything off from gmail and I read that in pine. It
gets everything regardless of filters, except spam.

My android synchs with gmail (obviously) and using the gmail app I can send as
my "real" email address (and this scales obviously so I can send as any of a
number of addresses I need to). I make heavy use of filters so I only get
relevant stuff on my phone.

My daily ritual is to sit down at pine and scan non-vital email (such as
newsletters and mailing lists etc.) that I didn't get on my phone because I
filter stuff so heavily, then for each email apply the "GTD" approach of doing
anything that can be done immediately, or forwarding it to a Basecamp todo
list (using mailmanagr.com) or a Highrise task (depending on whether it's
sales related or actual work that I have to do).

This generally takes me less than 30 minutes and is a great triage exercise.

Instead of teaching kids how to code in schools, let's start by teaching them
how to use email! We used to learn how to write letters, why aren't we doing
advanced email training in schools?

~~~
drivingmenuts
Which part of email requires advanced training? The writing - covered by
grammar, etc. The thinking - covered by critical thinking.

The spectacularly complex system you have set up to filter your email? That
would be worth a semester or so. It's worth it for you, I'm sure, but the
average person probably would collapse trying to set that up.

~~~
dools
_Which part of email requires advanced training?_

Primarily subject line usage and interleaved replies.

 _The spectacularly complex system you have set up to filter your email_

It's basically just GTD on steroids. Basecamp and Highrise are used by
millions of non-technical people. Reading email in a text based email client
isn't rocket science and, I think, would be a skill on par with learning to
communicate with letters. Also gmail filters aren't advanced, and Android is
pretty mainstream (as is gmail). The only tricky bits there are using an
external SMTP server (made simpler through things like Mailgun, Sendgrid and
JangoSMTP) and configuring fetchmail to POP from gmail.

The rest of the components are all very simple and readily available. In my
experience people are able to cope with seemingly overwhelming complexity as
long as they were instrumental in it's creation and the bits that make up the
complex whole are themselves quite simple.

~~~
drivingmenuts
I would be interested (in an academic sense) of seeing documentation on the
process you've set up and how you tied it together.

I use a far simpler method, akin to a pile.

------
ezy
This person needs to try outlook. You see, there's a little flag you can click
on next to the email with a task priority. And a todo bar/list which shows
them in priority order. Not only has it existed before, but it really doesn't
help that much. You still need to apply yourself to use it correctly. This
doesn't change that.

Sigh... but then I knew I was in for wheel re-invention as soon as I saw the
"modern creative workflow" sales bullshit. Perhaps there's something to be
gained by making it prettier than outlook, I dunno. I feel like Alan Kay --
read about your history folks. If you're going to "re-invent email" you might
want to, I don't know -- try out many different existing email clients?

~~~
pseale
Thank you. Outlook 2007 and 2010 have a) flags, b) user-taggable-color-coded
categories, c) an extremely usable ToDo bar, and d) Xobni and a million other
plugins that attempt to prioritize your incoming mail automatically.

I'm not saying Outlook works for me (it doesn't), but it's annoying that the
author pretended Outlook doesn't exist, and essentially proposed his version
of Outlook as a solution to the "problem".

------
the_gipsy
Uh, let me see. Attempt nº 5712 to revolutionize the way we use email. Tell me
more.

"Mark as read" is useless? I thought nowaday we had "archive", "search" and
such from gmail... no mention of that. OK then, let's see what you offer...

"Clutter-free interface", "clean typography" and the mystery option "what you
really need"? Are you (f) kidding me? This can't scream "I'm thunderbird but
made by graphical designers" any louder.

Oooh Actionsteps! I have NO idea what you are, but you must be "what I really
need"! Scroll, scroll, still no idea... Aha! I have Favourites (why didn't I
come up with that?), and Actionsteps, which "organize" my stuff. So like,
categories, but with a mysterious name.

And, it can handle attachments! What year is this?

Plus facebook etc integration like that's something I'd ever not want to
disable.

Attempt nº 5712 archieved.

~~~
dclowd9901
I still maintain we should ignore the "problem" with email and instead focus
on making it easier just to share stuff. As it stands, it's always a crap
shoot when I send a file to someone as to whether or not they'll actually be
able to read it.

------
ben0x539
holy shit just write your web pages in html, not everything needs to be a
crazy javascript abomination where the _body text fades in slowly_

~~~
tambourine_man
If it falls back gracefully, why not?

As pointed by others, the site just is a bunch of JPEGs, which is a very bad
choice indeed (accessibility, search engine access, speed, etc).

But aesthetics do matter. If done properly, you could just grab the content
and use your favority reader with a click of a button in case you desagree
with the author's taste.

~~~
onli
>If it falls back gracefully, why not?

It doesn't. Content doesn't load here on a FF with js disabled (not that i do
this normally, disable JS, just tested it because of your comment).

I think it kind of matters in this case. The "mail has to be repaired" is such
an overused term, and seldom the people claiming that even try to give reasons
for this ruling. Mail is an asynchronic system for letting people send
messages (with attachments) and it works really well. If someone fails to see
that, claiming something is broken which most probably isn't and is doing that
from a technically broken site, it weakens his point even further.

So mentioning the observation isn't totally out of place.

------
rubergly
Looking at <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1072027/Screenshots/1z.png>, I find the
comment about "perfect spacing and clean typography" almost laughable. I also
prefer design that incorporates smart typography to convey importance and
structure. His app mockups seem to show an understanding of this, but the site
layout in general (especially this section) does not.

(1) why is the "We spend a huge amount of our day..." text in red? (2) why is
that text smaller than the previous chunk of text? (3) why is that entire
previous chunk of text italicized? (4) how is "Mark as read is useless..." at
all related to "Emails aren't just emails anymore"? why are these in the same
paragraph? "Mark as read" seems like it should be the beginning of a list of
complaints about email, not the supporting sentence for "Emails aren't just
emails anymore" -- this just comes off as extremely bad flow of thought, and
the typography makes it more confusing. (5) why is the heading for each of the
boxes split into all-caps tiny text and no-caps large text? the idea in itself
isn't terrible, but the tiny text is too tiny, and the splitting into tiny and
large text isn't consistent -- clearly it's meant so that the large text can
be read on its own and the tiny text adds to the experience upon closer
inspection, and so putting the "and" at the end of the "A clean and" tiny text
for the first box makes sense, but then why is the "and" at the beginning of
the "and clean typograhpy" large text in the second box?

------
moeffju
Sparrow is so close to this. All it's lacking is the all-attachments view and
the prioritizing, but you can hack the prioritizing easily enough with Gmail
labels. Even then, I don't think that's enough, though. I think e-mail
nowadays needs to be more of a TODO manager and less about messaging.

~~~
calinet6
Agreed, 100%. I saw the screenshot and thought, "Oh, it's Sparrow with some
red colors and a new little organization feature. Neat."

Sparrow is literally this exact client design, minus the cute "Actionsteps" or
whatever. They could easily add some more color coding to Sparrow and it would
fill this need pretty easily (well, that and fix some annoyances, which as is
usually the case, is the larger usability problem—simply not being annoying).

More importantly, you're right: e-mail is no longer just communication. Our
e-mail clients are how we organize incoming tasks and work. This is why GTD
and the like focus so strongly on e-mail, because it's become our primary
means of incoming information. Organizing that is the problem, and it does
need a solution.

------
ScottWhigham
MS Outlook has had something along these lines for years - they call it
something else ("Quick Click" or something) but it allows you at least one-
click colorization + task creation. It's not quite like he lays out but it's
the basic idea of his "Actionsteps". I don't use it, and I would consider
myself an Outlook power user. I have learned techniques that, quite frankly,
just work better for me.

~~~
Splines
I use Outlook every day too, but don't really bother with the task tools that
are built into it (even if it might (might!) integrate better with my email).

It's too general-purpose. It's like giving me a full toolbox, and the only
limit is my mind! I'd rather have a tool that is more purpose-built to handle
my needs.

These days I track todo-s in Trello and make sure my Inbox unread count stays
at 0. That's it.

The only thing I'm missing is better attachment management, but that's just a
nice-to-have. It's not a problem I personally run into very often. I could
imagine though if your workflow involved lots of attachments it could be
frustrating that they're treated as second-class citizens.

~~~
ScottWhigham
I use the heck out of the appts and tasks - appts are "things that I have to
physical participate in" (phone call, lunch) and tasks are "reminders". I
would not survive long without those. I use Trello but only to manage a small
team of tasks.

You said, "The only thing I'm missing is better attachment management" - to
me, the worst part about Outlook is the search functionality. It's just awful
IMO. I can deal with the crappy attachment handling/saving/etc but when it
takes a week for the "Instant Search" thing to index my 2gb Outlook file, I
get pissed haha

------
huhtenberg
The problem is that this approach helps _his_ workflow and it does absolutely
nothing for _mine_. I understand what he describes, I just can't relate to it.

------
saint-loup
The layout of the page (or lack thereof) makes it hard to know what portion
you must focus on. The flow is really messy.

~~~
mnicole
This was my hangup. My eye was going towards all of the heavy red and black
shapes and not the screenshots themselves.

~~~
alan_cx
Phew, thought I was the only one. Like I was getting old or something.

------
myoffe
Leave email alone. It's doing it's job 95% alright. Just use a reasonable
client (e.g. <http://mail.google.com>, Sparrow) and there is really almost
nothing to complain about.

The problem is that we are using email for _everything_. Since Facebook,
people rarely send pictures to each other anymore. Since Blogging, people
rarely send long personal stories to 100 friends. Etc', etc... Slowly and
carefully we find the right alternatives to the default, which is email.

If you need task management, use Asana or something. It's really good, and it
integrates with email quite well. Also, Trello is excellent as a flexible
Kanban board.

It's all about finding and using (rigorously) the right tool. Don't force
everything you need in computing into email, and you won't have to reinvent
email.

I really doubt email will change at all. Maybe it will die, or be less common.
But it will not change.

It's so simple, why change it anyway?

------
brianlovin
Is there anything out there right now that handles email attachments like
described in this pitch? I would love the ability to see all the attachments
ever sent to me, organized by date/sender/filetype. Or clicking on a contact
and seeing all attachments I've shared with that person.

~~~
davegauer
The mail client built into the Opera browser has an Attachments filter which
allows you to see all messages by attachment type. After that, you can sort
the messages by 'From', 'Subject', 'Size', etc. No thumbnails as in his
example, though.

As with everything in the Opera mail client, it is all handled through two
panes - filtering on the left (Unread, Received, Labels, Attachments, etc.)
and the email messages themselves on the right. All email accounts are
aggregated together. I've been hugely enamored with its simplicity and
elegance for years.

------
PaulHoule
Many of the facile assumptions designers make about email are wrong.

The sanebox service, for instance, has the same wrong assumption -- that the
problem is spam and unimportant emails.

The toughest problem I have in email management is important emails that are
difficult to answer. For instance, before I took off for San Diego this week,
I had to answer an email that required a prompt reply. This email involved an
important relationship for which the circumstances had radically changed -- I
wasn't sure what I wanted out of the situation or what I could do for the
other party.

Given an email like that, my natural temptation is to put off dealing with
them, so I have a plug of "important and somewhat urgent" messages sitting in
my box at any time.

Spam and other unimportant messages, on the other hand, can be deleted in
seconds, and pose very little cognitive load. If there's any real cost of
dealing with spam it's that I have an itchy trigger finger and occasionally
delete an email that I shouldn't.

------
pbnjay
I love this concept.

I'm curious how well this would work for multiple projects, a blend of
personal and work email, and high-volume inboxes. Seems like it'd really need
some type of labeling in addition to the actionsteps.

Hopefully I get some free time this week, I might look into building some of
this. Looks like fun.

~~~
peterkchen
Labeling would definitely be a key feature set especially if it's heavily
integrating with email service providers like gmail. What were you thinking of
building it in?

I've been working on something similar in the past year and I'm considering
bringing it back.

------
SeoxyS
As a designer, the OP should know better than to design webpages as a giant
<img> tag... It's unreadable on my Retina MBP.

------
ollysb
I like the idea of creating actions from within your email client. Integration
with some project management tools like pivotal or trello would really smooth
off this part of my workflow.

~~~
Zash
Both Evolution and Thunderbird with the Lightning plugin has right-click →
convert to task. Lots of room for improvement, but it works.

~~~
drunkenfly
Even Outlook has it. Right click, Follow up to create a task; right click,
Categorize - to assign category. Out of the box, no plugins required.

------
porker
Immediate thoughts:

From a business perspective, 3 steps like that isn't enough. What I really
want is email completely integrated with a CRM/Project management tool & a
calendar - I have tried Googl Apps and the whole Email / Tasks / Calendar
separation just doesn't work. From what I've seen Exchange comes close, and I
believe one of the others (Zimbra?) does too.

The problem with email is everyone uses it differently. The email client that
works for my work emails won't work for my personal email account and vice
versa.

Minimalist for GMail is nice, it starts to improve by removing clutter:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfdde...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfddepdpdafhhepdbek)
and I wouldn't be without it.

I totally agree about typography - it would make a massive difference. But not
just here, everywhere.

Grouping email is another problem - I've tried folders (one per email, not
enough), tags/labels (unmanageable). This is symtomatic of our whole digital
information management issue - how do we deal with so much flexible
information? Hence my need for a CRM/tasks/todo app on top of email.

[Background: I run a small company, it's growing, and managing
projects/developers/clients/email is a headache. If you've found a way to
reduce the pain, say!]

~~~
jorangreef
Am working on this. Please leave your email at <https://ronomon.com> and I
will let you know when it's ready.

------
sramsay
I take the point about clutter and typography, but the _best_ email client I
have ever used is nmh
<[http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/>](http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/>), largely because I
was able to hack together this kind of work flow effortlessly. I'm always
marveling at how modern clients lack the capabilities I have in a piece of
software that has changed little since the RAND Corporation put it together
decades ago.

------
alexwolfe
I think it's an interesting UI design and concept and has some strong visual
appeal to it. I realize a lot of the concepts in this design have been tried
before in one way or another. However, just as important as the design is
seeing how if actually feels. I think it certainly looks good in photoshop but
the trick is executing in a way that makes it feel "right" too. Any plans for
development?

------
joch
If you are into GTD, an email workflow for handling email could be much more
flexible. Example when going through your inbox:

1\. Respond to/do anything that can be done in two minutes and archive the
email. (It helps if you are maintaining your inbox at zero.)

2\. If it takes longer than a few minutes to do, send it off to your GTD app
for processing as an action step, waiting for or something else, and archive
the email.

------
gcr
Is anyone else seriously disturbed by the layout?

The whole page is a big giant JPEG full of unscalable, unsearchable text.

Google doesn't read .JPEGs. Kiss your SEO goodbye.

I can't zoom into a page like this. When I do, it's pixelated and you've
somehow managed to screw up the horizontal scrollbar so I can't even read the
text on the left and right sides.

This also makes the site completely unbearable under any screen resolution
smaller than 1280x1024.

------
nicholassmith
I've been through mail clients for a while now, and I've even written one. The
thing I realised is, even when it does exactly what I want I'm still burdened
by the fact that for my needs email sucks, so I've managed to move a lot of
work stuff to things like Asana for project management, and the email side of
it is pretty much for junk and occasional correspondence.

------
runjake
Nevermind classic email clients, let's begin with the method the author used
to make his point. It's a verbose mish-mash of disjointed text flow and
pseudo-infographics. It does not flow well at all.

From what I can tell, you can achieve his vision of an email client by
changing preferences in Mountain Lion's Mail.app client, so his vision is here
today (well, soon).

------
patrickmay
I'm not going to take design advice from a website that thinks it knows better
than I do how wide my browser window should be.

------
mariusmg
Horrible site. The text is served as jpg image. This guy can't get the basics
right but it's designing "experiences"....

------
backspace
Wow, haven't read such a vaporware article in awhile. The author promises a
"I'm going to change 30+ years of email UI/UX" and instead proposes 4
different labels and a workflow that works for him. Yup, you revolutionalized
email alright.

------
ethanbird
Looking through the article, I found most of the changes to be superficial,
other than 'actionsteps,' which I'm not convinced will solve any problem.
Instead of trying to stop mail from becoming a separate to-do list,
actionsteps encourages you to keep some to-dos in your mail client and the
rest outside of your mail client in a third party app.

Also, I tried the social thing with emails, and what it looks great in theory.
However, I really don't get a lot of emails from people I'm friends with on
Facebook or follow on Twitter.

------
corywatilo
Postbox does everything he mentioned, and has for quite some time. It might
behoove this guy to do some due diligence in the space, or maybe take time to
explain how his designs are better than current apps.

Also, while his designs look "nice", they are over-designed and would start
looking stale very quickly. When you're building a product that is used on a
daily basis, less "design" is more. But I'm sure as a result of this post,
he'll find some clients and make some money from it, so good for him.

------
jetz
Email nor anything related to core email protocols do not need to be fixed or
redesigned. It's doing what it was supposed to be used for and still doing it
very well. Over the years desktop and web mail people have added too much and
its 70s design idea of anyone can send mail to any other's inbox (btw,
creative idea at the time worked till 2000s) have cooperatively decreased its
usage.

We still need this universal and mature protocol but we should do a different
thing for communication. period.

------
beilabs
Just going to pimp a startup working out of Sydney called ZeroMail.

zeromail.com is a real product looking to shake up the traditional email
client. Best of luck to them!

------
apricot13
at the risk of sounding like a broken record, when I read the 'actionsteps'
section I immediately thought of TSW. <http://www.thesecretweapon.org/>

the idea behind it is is that we don't rely on the inbox for our todo list -
which is what we all tend to do! because, email isn't designed as a todo list
and neither are any email clients I've used :P

------
ereckers
The take away here should be, if you're going to spend time redesigning email
clients, you should take an equal or greater amount of time laying it out on
your website. So much for sharing ideas. When half the comments trash your
WordPress template before they even get to the subject, you know it's a tough
crowd.

------
bradgessler
This looks almost identical to Sparrow with the exception that Sparrow simply
uses a star as an action item.

------
tuananh
LOL, this looks identical to Sparrow!

~~~
johnernaut
My exact thoughts when I first saw his screenshots.

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christiangenco
Please, please, please - for the love of all that is good and grammatical -
change "noone" to "no one" as quickly as you can possibly photoshop in
mail2.jpeg. This single error tainted your argument (for me, at least) for the
rest of the page.

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ricardobeat
Title should be _Redesigning Sparrow_ :)

The design is clearly inspired in Sparrow, which already does the facebook
pictures thing, nice typography and all. It's only missing the "action levels"
(you can only mark as favorite/important).

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RyanMcGreal
Forgive me if I'm missing something, but I already have this with my
Thunderbird email client, which allows me to assign tags with customizable
names and colours and to sort my emails into an arbitrary set of folders.

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vlokshin
At first I was going to commend the author on being a UI/UX reincarnation of
Dieter Rams (I know he isn't dead yet, so that's not quite logical). Then I
realize the entire page was all images. Why???

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RobMcCullough
Slightly unrelated but your portfolio webpage is absolutely gorgeous!

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alan_cx
Dont know about any one else, but I couldn't close the window fast enough
after the page loaded. It just assaulted my brain. I have no idea why. It
literally repelled me. Quite strange.

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jph
Mail-Pilot is awesome for email as an inbox. Take a look at Mail-Pilot.com and
how it has read later, tasks, connections to people, and more. Disclosure that
I'm one of their backers.

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JBiserkov
Microsoft (Outlook+Exchange+Lync (formerly Office Communicator))

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krollew
Yeah. So why you didn't earned bilions of dolars on new, great e-mail clients?
Maybe it's not what people needs, huh?

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twelvechairs
I feel sorry for the author here. Its very easy to criticise and hard to
create. There are a lot of people here trying to tear him down. If you know
better - stop sitting around on Hackernews and go make it. If not, then stop
whining when someone is trying to do something constructive - or at the very
least provide some points you think he can fix and be nice about it, not like
a petulant 12-year old...

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mcdillon
So have you heard of www.mail-pilot.com?

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blakeburch
There are chrome extensions that solve these functional issues. ActiveInbox
and Attachments.me

UI/UX is still up in the air.

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tshadwell
Have you taken a look at the code? It's disgusting, seriously.

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eschulte
GNUS already supports _all_ of the features proposed by this article
(including personalized pictures) and it has been around since the early 90s.

edit: s/early 90s/late 80s/

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obilgic
to much text for a "disruptive" idea

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skylamer
cufon+a lot of jquery and look what happens...

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gasuns
Like PostBox only online.

