The Perfect Email Client?

An anonymous reader sends: "Can those who review also design? Trying to practice what it preaches, CNET published this article, a description of the perfect e-mail client. Next up, apparently: hardware and electronics designs."

Comments

the bat

[fyonn]

for me the bat (www.ritlabs.com) comes close, now if oly they did a version for freebsd, even linux would do)

dave

Hmmm

[hattig]

Pine has done the colouration of emails based upon criteria for years now, and it is a most useful feature that I would like to see in other email clients.

The other points here are a checklist for current open source email clients (Evolution, KMail, Mozilla Mail, etc) - many of the features are already integrated of course. It is just Outlook that is lacking, and it will remain lacking because Microsoft take ages to upgrade software, and then only add features they think the user needs, not what the user actually needs.

One thing I hear a lot about is the Amiga email program YAM as being extremely good. It is open source as well - a Unix port would be interesting.

Re:Hmmm

[Paladin128]

Although many email clients offer *some* of these features in some form, the point is no client offers them all in a consise form. As a Human-Computer Interation (HCI) designer by trade, most of their design is head-on. The Floating PIM pane is a great idea, particularly if it has one line that notifies when new email is there and from whom, and can be used to un-hide the actual email client.

The split pane for the email messages, if done properly, could be nicely exploited. The "SPAM" button is a wonderful idea. The integrated instant messaging I could easilly do without... too hard to do it in both a useful and intuitive method.

I'm probably going to implement many of these designs this summer in a cross-platform open source email client. I may use some other client as a base as I'm not familiar with POP3 or IMAP. I'll probably wind up doing this in Qt.

Sounds good, actually

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I think they've done a pretty good job, actually. I particularly like the integrated encryption and spam-reporting tools. These are widely asked for by those in the business, and yet no mainstream e-mail client seems to provide them. I'm sure more people would use them if they were easily available, rather than something you have to fight for. For example, there is a helpful service for spam complaints, who amongst other things will forward the details to the relevant abuse address, but how many people know that, or where to find it?

That said, I'd settle for just having the colour-coded "new mail" icon with the ability to hover over it and see the sender/title. At the office, where we use Outlook/Exchange Server, one of our guys tried to write a tool that hooked into Outlook and did that a while back. Unfortunately, he found insurmountable problems with the way Outlook's automation and new mail reporting features work. Too bad, as the rest of us were looking forward to him finishing it! That alone, to me, would be a major improvement. Here's hoping some of the guys at MS read the article!

Eudora

[Beowulf_Boy]

Eudora would be a great email client, if it weren't for a few things.
1. I don't believe it is out for Linux
2. Wierd ass server naming conventiongs. Your server name is usually like, mail.myrealbox.com in netscape, Yet in Eudora it ends up being, Username@imap.myrealbox.com, and sometimes that even doesn't work, its strange.
3. Buggy as crap, and doesn't like alot of servers from what I can figure
4. Ok, joke error messages are funny, if you know what they are supposed to mean. "I sent the password to the server, and said, shhhh, don't tell anyone, and the server said....shhhh....this ..won't work." Ok, is it a bad password, bad server naming convention, or a dozen others. I've seen it do this when I know my net connection is down, so its like, WTF!

Good stuff
1. multiple email boxes/servers/usernames
2. Easy to set rules
3. easy interface
4. tech support is disant from the one time I used it.
5. the only problems with the free one is that there are adds on the bottom left, very small noninvasive adds.
6. you can do cool crap like not only mark an email as read, but mark it with 10 different colors, so you can seperate them between clients/problems or etc.

Re:Mutt?

[Fweeky]

Maildrop may be a reasonable replacement to the procmail part, since procmail's rather messy and has a filter language that would make Larry Wall blush.

Mulberry

[the eric conspiracy]

I am surprised to not see Mulberry suggested. It's one of the few email clients (if not the only email client) specifically designed from the ground up for use with IMAP. It's fast, reliable. It doesn't fully support HTML mail (a good thing). It has versions for almost every platform - Win, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris.

I've been using Mulberry for a year and a half now, and there is no way I would go back to Exchange or Eudora (whose crappy behavior started me looking for an alternative).

Re:Actually, Sylpheed will do this

[rifter]

Forget Outlook. If rules are what you are after, and scoring, and colouring, sylpheed-claws is the answer. These features may end up in the main sylpheed, as well.

Re:Let me IGNORE HTML mail!

[Shiny Metal S.]

I am sick of getting HTML spam that automatically starts banging on my net connection, even before I get chance to blacklist the appropriate site through Junkbuster.

When there's something like this in the email:

<img src="http://www.xxx/is-alive.cgi?a=your@email">

and your client loads this image, they know someone is reading their spam at your address and they can log that your address is worth spamming, for future spam or selling it to other spammers. So your stolen bandwidth is actually a little problem, automatically rendering html email has much more serious problems than wasting the bandwidth. It's like a return receipt request which you can't ignore. A return receipt which is not sent by email but directly through tcp/ip, so the email sender knows your geographical location, your ISP, etc.