

No Money in Email Clients - mwcampbell
http://blog.gerv.net/2013/04/no-money-in-email-clients/

======
brownbat
> "Is it simply that webmail is good enough for most people?"

I'd say there's a healthy chunk of people who find it way better. They see
webmail as having better security [1-3], portability [4], usability [5], and
even speed [6].

I know a lot of client fans cherish their offline access, power features, and
speed [6].

But I don't think it's fair to dismiss either side as "just satisficing,"
there are legitimate perks to value on both sides of the ledger. These perks
may be just balanced enough that it's difficult to add "monetary cost" to one
side of the scales without shifting preferences.

[1] [http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-
list/vendor_id-26/pr...](http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-
list/vendor_id-26/product_id-113/Microsoft-Outlook.html)

[2] [http://www.mozilla.org/security/known-
vulnerabilities/thunde...](http://www.mozilla.org/security/known-
vulnerabilities/thunderbird.html)

[3] Family tech support in the early 2000s. Viruses hopping into every damn
address book. I have not lost the grudge, even though things are probably much
better.

[4] You can use webmail on a random library / friend's / work computer without
an install (not that you should)

[5] Webmail means never having to say IMAP (or POP)

[6] This last bit may seem like a contradiction, but each group can find speed
improvements in different ways. Time into interface? Webmail. Interface
responsiveness? Client. The former is a big win once per session, the latter
is lots of little wins throughout a session. Faster machines can improve time
into interface, webapp responsiveness is harder, but has made some progress
(probably as hard to acknowledge as it is for me to see security
improvements).

~~~
BerislavLopac
I wholeheartedly agree, but I'm still curious how come there are no better
Webmail clients. Most are either old-fachioned (like Roundcube) or tied to a
proprietary service (like Gmail), but I don't see much effort going into cool,
Sparrow-like webmail clients, either open-source or commercial. Or have I
missed something?

------
tyre
I find this, a couple of weeks after Mailbox gets acquired for (reportedly)
~$100M, a strange thing to say.

As well, just last July, Sparrow was acquired for tens of millions as well.

------
gavinlynch
I think that's a large part of the reason so many email clients are poor in
rendering support. At least mobile/tablets have come around, but there is a
lot of bad stuff going on in webmail (specifically Gmail) and desktop clients.

<http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/>

~~~
hollerith
A lot of people are opposed to HTML, CSS and JS in email messages. We do not
want email to become this very complicated thing like the web has become.

~~~
gavinlynch
Admittedly, I do not understand this position. With all due respect, you're
not living in reality. The reality is that email already is this "complicated
thing like the web". The proliferation of myriad screen sizes from mobile to
tablet to desktop, and current industry trends with respect to "responsive
design" dictate modern front-end developers to adapt and mimic as close to
desktop-level support as possible.

For those that do, in my opinion, this type of mentality can be viewed as
short-sighted and non-constructive to the platform as a whole.

~~~
hollerith
Your voice is professional and reasonable, but your skill with words cannot
conceal the fact that what you are wishing for in this thread is bad for the
world because it would tend to make it less secure, less reliable, less
predictable and more tedious for people to continue to use email to exchange
plain text and simple attachments like images with their friends, employers,
customers and suppliers. Things that are easy now (at least for those like
myself who send and receive mostly plain text messages) like selecting an
extent of text in an email with a pointing device (e.g., to copy it),
searching for a string in an email ("find in page") or saving a message to a
file or a note-taking application like Evernote will become more difficult and
less reliable just like happened on the web over the last 15 years.

~~~
gavinlynch
couple of quick points, but first a joke: Spoken like a true operations guy :p
(tongue-in-cheek, rimshot)

1) I wonder if you'd be in the room as Tim Burners-Lee was inventing the IMG
element, describing to him the security implications and why it's a nonviable
component from a support perspective. I wonder if you would describe his new
invention as also "bad for the world" just because it has implications for you
job?

2) The technology is already built. Slapping a common modern rendering engine
into your email client with your own custom tweaks is just so easy. A quarter
of your job is already done.

3) As I said, you're not living in reality. I completely understand your
workflow, because it mirrors my own (right down to the Evernote detail).

However, you're just a minor subset in the holistic view of the email
ecosystem. There is real pressure from stakeholders and users for great
looking email. There are entire industries whose only job is to make email
look nice. And yes, even beyond the table of geniuses in the Marketing
department, there is actual value in nice-looking email.

I also take it that you've never sat in a meeting with Marketing where they
are asking "why can't our email just look like our website??". And then you
think about it, and you realize it's an entirely reasonable question.

4) If you're doing it right, you are sending a plain-text version alongside
your HTML version. In my view, it's a necessity.

5) Your searching for a string point is moot. It's not a strict text-only
search that is impeded by HTML directives, it's exceedingly trivial for
rendering engines to figure out how to search for Strings while ignoring
intervening markup.

6) Why do you, and so many who think like you, believe that email should
always be the bastard step-child of the web? Honest question.

~~~
mwcampbell
> 6) Why do you, and so many who think like you, believe that email should
> always be the bastard step-child of the web? Honest question.

Bastard step-child? This suggests an ignorance of history. Email came long
before the Web.

~~~
gavinlynch
What is your point, other than pedantic nonsense? Who cares that email came
before TBL's WWW. In terms of current support for modern technologies, as
proselytized by everyone's favorite web consortium (W3C), email clients'
support is abysmal. If you want to pretend that the first agent to a system
will always have the best solution, through virtue of chronology, be my guest.
It's a silly and losing proposition.

