Ask HN: Is there room for another e-mail client? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there room for another e-mail client?

7 pointsjason_slack5 comments

With the demise of Sparrow (we can argue the definition of demise, yes) I find myself with no real alternative e-mail client anymore

Thunderbird doesn't work well for my work flow

Eudora is long gone.

Sometimes I go back to using Pine, Alpine, Sylpheed, Mutt.

Apple Mail is OK, more polished than it used to be but I find it slow and unstable with large amounts of Mail.

Outlook, gets better with each release, cannot handle my 12GB of mail at all, lots of continual corruption. Seems very bloated in CPU and RAM consumption although it is very full featured.

I miss Postmaster from BeOS. It was powerful, lightweight, fast.

GyazMail was pretty good, but alas very slow to make development progress.

GMail web interface works OK for me.

I know I am rambling on and on but does anyone else feel e-mail has changed from the mid-90's. It used to be exciting to receive e-mail. Now I dread my inbox and dread just how innovative e-mail has become. I have a lot of ideas on how to make e-mail fun and productive.

Does anyone else wish E-Mail and the way we interact with e-mail was different? How so?

Additional: I think e-mail is thought of as so commonplace now-a-days that nobody is innovating. Rather just keeping up with the bare minimum necessary features people expect out of e-mail.

Why can't my e-mail client automatically organize e-mails for me without me having to create filters/rules? Why can't my e-mail client help me fight SPAM versus just learning to filter it away from my view? I save a lot of mail, I have 12 years work of things that I might need to reference someday, Why can't my e-mail client prepare an overview for me of interactions I have had with people so I dont have to search and wade through e-mail to find something?

I'd like to explore this and create an app that works better for the way we use e-mail now. I can code in C++ like a rockstar but I will struggle with UI design.

Ok I'll give you my idea.

I hate one aspect of email: all the spam/solicitations that websites love to bombard me with. Meetup.com is a particular egregious example, being next to impossible to unsubscribe from.

Also, not all emails are equal. Emails from friends, family, or colleagues are important and should be treated on the same notification level as texts. But notifications emails from spammy websites set off the same notifications. I probably check my phone 90% of the time only to find out someone liked my post on <insert-social-network-here>. It's gotten to the point where I have to use multiple email addresses to register for websites.

My idea: A regulated email exchange. Each email account gets 10-50 tokens. Whenever someone emails you, they attach their token. As recipient, you can then choose whether to return the token or not. Keeping the token means that sender can't send you any more emails until you return the token. Returning the token means you acknowledge the email sender is legitimate and not a spammer.

Also, the less tokens a sender has, the less spammy emails they can send out. When they hit zero tokens, they're effectively dead in the water. The idea is to cut down on all the BS, unnecessary emails and raise the quality of sent emails.

In short: users exchange tokens with other users they want to interact with. users withhold tokens from other users they don't want to interact with. spammy websites have a lot less ammo with which to bombard users with.

Step one: stop and think what you liked and why. GMail worked for you. Why? The reason it works for me is MH-like semantics, proper MIME handling, and distributed/"cloud based" storage.

I'd take a locally hosted solution in a heartbeat. (Even if I did have to write hooks for calendar integration.)

Labels, Priority Inbox are rally what would keep me in the web interface. Sparrow showed the labels next to the message so I could easy associate.

I would change clients if my new client has a "summarize this" feature - the ability to get the gist of an email into bullets. Or even my entire inbox (excluding marketing emails, etc).

Fair warning: you'll need much more than "rockstar C++" skills for this :)

I would change clients if the new client prioritized speed. I hate waiting and dealing with constant lag just because I don't like deleting email. If you build a client that can handle 10k+ emails spread through 5 different inboxes I would pay for it.

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