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Comment by bbx | Hacker News Reader

This is probably a good approach to the permanent "How to fix email" problem.

"Add-on" is the keyword here. Instead of disrupting your workflow by offering a distinct native app developed from scratch, this simply enhances an already great experience. I consider Gmail's UI very efficient and actually quite close to perfection (speed, reliability, labels, filters, multiple inboxes, keyboard shortcuts...). Gmelius just corrects the small annoyances that remain or have appeared lately.

This reminds me of a sentence in Dropbox's YC application: "With Dropbox, you hit "Save", as you normally would, and everything just works." The worflow isn't altered. It's just better.

Of course, Gmelius is just and add-on, with no clear business model. But maybe that's all we need after all.

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Yes, that's called "writing an email client".

Then, we can find some kind of standard protocol between the client and the server so you can use your client with any email provider. We could call it... IMAP!

IMAP doesn't search as fast and as well as gmail, and probably never will.

so?

seriously. it does a better job than an old nx mbox, or other technology. i'm not trying to say it's not better, it's just amazing how impatient we've gotten in the last decade, and how much we've bought into "googlethink"

Why not? If an IMAP client issues a "SEARCH TEXT foobar" command, why shouldn't Gmail answer as fast and as well as it does online? Nothing in IMAP precludes good efficient search.

Reference: RFC 1730@6.4.4

In fact, it probably does. Also, Gmail IMAP has an IMAP extension to allow using Gmail's full search syntax if desired (https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap_extensions).

Google wants you to use the web interface, or their own mobile apps.

Have you tried something like:

http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS ?

Do you have to express your point so abrasively?

How exactly does writing an email client satisfy "instead of disrupting your workflow by offering a distinct native app developed from scratch"?

Remind me again why an e-mail client has to be a native app? Is there anything special that makes an e-mail client different from a, say, IRC client, which could be, for example, a browser extension such as Chatzilla?

This is beside the point, as bbx was saying that he preferred Gmail's UI over something new; the new thing living in a browser wouldn't really affect that :)

I'm not arguing with @bbx, I'm replying to your assumption that when @eloisant wrote "email client" he meant "native app email client" ;)

I was trying to express my belief that neither @bbx nor @eloisant were wrong: a browser extension implementing a generic e-mail client that talks to servers using IMAP might be a really good solution. I would certainly like to try using something like that.

For me, "how to fix email" is to get my nmh setup set up again since moving computers...

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