Alex Payne: The Problem With Email Clients | Hacker News Reader

Alex Payne: The Problem With Email Clients

al3x.net

49 pointsmqt29 comments

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?

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

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

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

The web isn't made for desktop-applications. It's broken in other ways too, so you have to wait in line.

afaik drap and drop is possible in IE.

No drag and Drop on web browsers hahaha. Seriously, who is this guy Alex Payne ?

Have a try at Nuxeo ECM for example, you will see

In 2001 this topic was extensively discussed in http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware1/default.asp?cmd=...

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.

I think the argument might be similar to why so many people here are using OS X rather than Linux.

I happen to use Gmail + Thunderbird (IMAP) + Ubuntu.

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.

"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)

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?

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

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.

There's a great interview of Frank Addante on Venture Voice. He mentions one startup of his devoted to building a new email platform for large scale (think FOX), real time communication. Didn't look into it at all, but it sounds like whatever he built is working well.

By the time you could develop a new mail protocol there probably wouldn't be enough users left to justify the effort.

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

"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.

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.

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

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

I'm glad you mentioned that...threads++

The real problem is that the heuristics that Mail.app and Gmail use to determine which emails constitute a thread/conversation are slightly different.

That means that GMail might count ten messages as being part of a conversation, but Mail.app will only count 8 of those as being part of the same thread.

It seems minor - but it's really infuriating when you try to switch back and forth.

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.

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.

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.

Nope, you're not the first one to notice this.

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/sfearthquakes-o.ht...

http://www.wingedpig.com/archives/2007/03/back_to_the_future...

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).

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