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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."
for me the bat (www.ritlabs.com) comes close, now if oly they did a version for freebsd, even linux would do)
dave
Is one who doesn't call every few days because they "can't get their email" It doesn't give any error messages they say, they just can't get it. Have them open up OE, and low and behold, a box asking for a username and password. At this point they SWEAR they don't have a password. After you explain that you MUST have a password, then they start with the "I don't know it" routine. I swear, its not worth it.
Auto response when you're away? Great! One e-mail, and I know that I have five hours to clean out your home office...
Hank! White!
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.
This reminds me a ton of when Homer was hired by his brother to design the ultimate car, the "car of the common man". Ugh. :-)
Josh Woodward
I've been planning an email system that is based on searches rather than folders. The user interface might be "folders" but in reality, each "folder" is actually a search into an email database. This means a number of things. First of all, emails can exist in any number of folders (including no folder at all). Folders can have all kinds of "complex" rules such as "unread emails plus emails that have been read within the last 10 minutes". This would be a kind of "inbox", for example. Then there could be "Today's emails". "Yesterday's emails", "Emails from Firstname Lastname", "Work related email" and so on. Emails can be flagged using filters to help categorizing them. For example you could have a folder "work emails" that simply search for all emails that have a "work" flag set. The work flag would be set when the email arrives by checking if the email matches a set of rules (is from certain people, is to a certain email address, has a certain topic etc.).
The basic idea is to get powerful email management without having to actually manage "at runtime". Instead, the management happens by setting up folders and rules.
One implementation idea is to implement it as an IMAP server that one would run locally. That would allow people to use existing email clients with this system. I haven't decided about that yet though.
I was looking for a skinable Email Client not to long ago, and this is why. After looking though what was availible ,by way of Email Clients,I desided that it was fairly obvious that everyones idea for a perfect inferface is different, so the only way I was going to get things just the way I wanted was to design the interface myself, unfortunantly I am still unable to find a skinable Email Client that is stable enough to use everyday. I may work on a ducttape rigged client myself.
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like asking for bloatware if you ask me. Like somebody once said, a tool should do one thing and do that one thing well.
I dunno, just my thought.
We are the music makers. We are the dreamers of the dreams.
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!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Eudora would be a great email client, if it weren't for a few things. ..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!
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
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.
Some just show that these people do not understand UI design (all powerful right-click. Yup, nice idea, but when you say how many options there are in modern clients, I wonder how you expect them all to fit in a context menu? As an example they give 'send all mail from this user to folder x' Well great, but to be all powerful they also need 'block email from this user','automatically reply to this user with x', direct all email with this subject to x' etc. all in the context menu)
Overall, a couple of nice ideas, a couple of dumb ideas, and a rehash of some oft-mentioned ideas. Hardly anything groundbreaking.
Oh, I like my Mutt/Procmail/Fetchmail Mail system most ... it simply does what it should do!
Life sucks.
when i want to read my email, i use an email client. when i want to message some one i use a messaging program. when i want to download porn i use a P2P app. most of the time the only 2 features om the email client i use is the reading "feature" and the "writing" feature. although it is useful to hava an address book in the email program. this is one of the reasons why i find pegasus so easy to use.its simple, lightweight, doesnt crash, supports HTML and RTF (bleck)and has an address book. this is all i need, not some complicated mail client that is full of uneccesary bloat that i , and may others dont need. remember, adding more features will reduce the stability of any program ie outlook & outlook express or kde vs enlightenment. (integrated browser crap)
so there. pfffffffffffff
-----im billy troll----- im better than you at everything you do.
Some spammers put in an image tag that includes the email address, or encoded email address as part of the image request string so that they know it has been opened. That way, they can verify the address.
Fight Spammers!
I think you're being overly negative. OK, I agree that I'd probably turn off the majority of features. I don't use most features in most of the other packages I use, either. But as long as there's an easy option to switch off the bits you don't want and the UI isn't forced upon you, the features they suggest would help many people and inconvenience no-one, AFAICS.
As for things like PGP -- yes, maybe they are obvious, but apparently not so much so that mainstream e-mail clients already do it, eh? This article doesn't seem intended to provide leading edge research, it's a summary of the state of play, and where they think improvements could be made. In most cases, I think they're right. Putting them down because they don't have ten new improvements (and they didn't ignore good features just because someone's mentioned them before) hardly seems fair.
No, most of it wasn't groundbreaking, but I don't think it was meant to be. It was a wish list, a summary of some missing features they'd like to see incorporated into e-mail clients, and a pretty good one, IMHO.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
As for autoresponders, they shouldn't be in the client unless that client (a) has access to envelope information, and (b) can send things as error messages (null envelope from). I also have rant about broken autoresponders.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
When I think about e-mail, I think about pine. Lately, I've been thinking about other clients for Linux. I sure as hell don't think about Outlook, unless there's a virus scare.
1. PIM.. Sounds nice, but I want my e-mail client to do *e-mail*, and do it well. No thanks.
2. Split box. Hmm. No problems with it, but I'm not sure I'd use it.
3. Built in IM. WHY?! FOR THE LOVE OF BOB, WHY?!
4. Auto-response. I'd still get twenty messages in the span of an hour asking 'r u ther?!?!?!' from people who can't figure out how to turn their speakers on.
5. Integrated PGP. This'd be great, because as it is now, PGP is too confusing for the average person to use.
6. Spam reporting.. to the spammer's ISP.. Heh. Considering most illegal spam comes from faked headers.. This'd work out great.
7. Mouse-over contact info. Very not bad idea.
8. Smart notification. Again, a not bad idea. I'm surprised this hasn't been implemented yet. (It probably has.)
9. Who needs a mouse? If you do, this might not be bad.
10. My e-mail doesn't seem like pregenerated drivel, so I doubt I'd use templates. I could see them being useful to businesses, though.
Bonus: Oh god, make the bloat stop.
In conclusion, we've got a few good ideas, and the rest.. Well, there's always emacs. It can do everything already.
There are three major points for my perfect email client:
1. Look and feel the same in X and console, so that I could make use of both xpdf/mozilla and remote mail reading.
2. Localization. Being non-native english speaker, this one is pretty important.
3. Keyboard navigation
For the last 4 years I am extremely satisfied with the combination:
- fetchmail (getting mail)
- procmail (sorting mail into mailboxes)
- mutt (reading/replying)
- vim (editing)
When it comes down to analyze mailbox and generate some reports, like for example, in the case with antivirus reports, I use perl with Mail::MboxParser module.
For all my friends, who need GUI to read email, I recommend using Mozilla and or Evolution
Leonid Mamtchenkov
The proposed design is way too busy with too many features I'd turn off if I were using it. The ultimate e-mail client IMHO is one that does e-mail, only e-mail and does it well. The ultimate e-mail client needs to:
1/ Support *all* inbound e-mail standards, pop, apop, pop over ssl, imap, imap over ssl, MicroSoft exchange (I don't want to run Outbreak^h^h^h^h^hlook), etc. I don't want to change e-mail clients to match up with whatever e-mail server is in use where I am working.
2/ Support *all* outbound e-mail standards, smtp *and* the various authenticated smtp methods. Security matters.
3/ Deal with *all* content standards, MIME, HTML, etc. and provied fine control over how they are viewed (e.g. no html, html without downloading images, etc.)
4/ Supports crypography (GPG, S/MIME, etc).
5/ Message filters. Filter inbound mail, filter on demand, etc. Filter on any header or other part of the message. Filter using external programs like spamassassin, etc.
6/ A Clean UI. No oversized cute buttons, etc. Let me decide where to put the list of my folders, messages in a folder, etc.
An example of an e-mail client that's close to ideal for me is KDE's Kmail.
Obviously bloatware has finally won, if users even request it. Is there really something wrong with the "toolbox" approach of one tool for one job, or is it only that Windows-socialized people never had a chance to learn about it (due to the lack of usable tools)?
(Then again, I use Gnus.. but that is of course something completely different!)
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Before I did any of this fancy stuff, I'd settle for fixing aol and outlook to have all mail sent to more than three recipients to be automatically bcc'd, unless overridden by the sender.
I'd love to see gabber and evolution linked together a little more. Perhaps automagic importing of vcards or right click options for emailing a contact on your gabber list.
I've gotta say, it'd be awesome for a corp environment. Gabber (and Jabber as a whole) is a pretty neat protocol, and includes a lot of features that I just love (gpg/pgp encrypted messages, ssl logins...god I love not having my traffic sniffed to death). Combine this with a jabber server in the corp setting, it'd pretty neat for communicating.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
There are some terrible ideas on that list:
... odd.
(1) Floating PIM pane.
This isn't an email client function. Sure, it's nice, and I do use Outlook's Calendar at work, but it's nothing to do with email. Having it hook into and be readily accessible from email window though - that'd be useful. Provided I get to choose what to use. Consider Outlook - it rules corporate email for one simple reason - scheduling meetings.
(2) Split view in-box.
Why split view? Why 2? Just make it more flexible.
Let one of them be my window to Usenet, let one be a project email folder.
(3) Instant Messaging.
Okay, I don't use IM. However, my views on it's utility aside, why would you want it embedded in a giant window? It's the sort of app that runs in a small window in the corner of the screen - sticking it in the email client is
(4) Calendar linked autoresponse.
NO NEED! Why would I want to send an email and get 30 replies all stating that they're in a meeting?
If I'd wanted instant replies I'd have phoned, or met in person. By mailing I'm batching the job - unless the person is gone for weeks I don't care.
Often even urgent work emails don't get replied to for 2-3 days. But that's fine for email. If people are away for days they can choose to set autoreply anyway.
Sounds like the ideal mailer would be a blend of Outlook and Mutt!
When some moron sends me dual-encoded HTML/text mail, let me prefer to show the text version. If they sent HTML-only mail, convert it to text. I never want to see HTML. Ever!
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.
(And no, I don't want to use a text-mode client. That's throwing the baby out with the bath water.)
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
How about a client that actually displays the email address of the sender with out forcing you to jump through hoops Microsoft? I am not an idiot and you are just confusing my mother because I have several email addresses. I must admit, though I wish it wasn't so, Outlook Express (security and usability issues aside) is the most stable IMAP client I've used on a windows box. Outlook 2k definitely isn't stable and I havn't tried Outlook 2002. I'll be swtiching to Mozilla (for email) when 1.0 is released and we'll see how that goes. Anxiously waiting for IMAP support in Opera. Pegasus has some promise but is quirky. Eudora is broken. Any other recommendations for windows IMAP clients?
Threading and scoring.
I don't know how I'd get through my mailbox without mutt threading and scoring things for me. I don't want things just dumped in another mailbox...I want my mail scored so that it has a priority meaningful to me. Threads clear up the view considerably.
I'm still trying to get Cygwin and mutt to work with my mail system, but no luck yet.
The Bat (previously mentioned) DOES have threading, so it's part way there. Pretty decent for a fairly cheap client.
I've tried mostly every windows email client out there, I chose pocomail because of it's abillity to handle multiple email addresses as well as filter all the mailing lists I'm on to seperate folder. It also has a functional email filter, is scriptable and you can skin it. If you are the type of peson that actually reads documentation it will do just about anything. I think it's fairly stable and it's one of 2 programs I have _ever_ purchased.
PocoMail.com
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Comes pretty close to my ideal.
1. Simple refreshing design. Does one thing and does it well. Simple enough for Mom and complex enough to handle a deluge of Mail.
2. Security-- Built in support for using ssh for communication. No virus threat.
3. Superb search functions. All e-mail is auto indexed using AIAT (Sherlock) for rapid search. You have to try it to believe it...
4. Open design to allow add-ins/services. My favorites include Word Service for formatting, SpamCop service for reporting Spam, GPGP support for encryption.
5. Easy organization. Multiple signatures, templates, accounts, mailboxes.
6. Internet standards compliant. No proprietary stuff.
7. Anti bloat. At 3.5 MB it is small by today's standards...
Despite a committed kmail user at home, I have to use outlook at work. My job takes me around the world, so I am often having to connect using not very good communication links. The biggest problem I have is that the user interface locks up solid when its is trying to communicate with the server. I can see no reason why it has to, just bad design.
The other issue that this review misses is the difference between e-mail that is person to person (ie the sender knows who the readers are) and mailing lists (where generally the post gets sent to those people who happen to be subscribed). Most of the facilities being requested are for the first type of communication, whilst the second needs a completely different set of priorities. This suggests the integration of the NNTP protocol, the ability to subscribe and unsubscribe automatically from lists and much stronger threading capability (and associated actions such as ignore or watch threads) are functions that are built in.
My big desire would be the ability to do something with my email outside of the client... maybe I want to save years upon years of email by writing a program to parse them and store them in a mysql database... something like that.
An XML file format that was something like:
thisdude@greatideas.org
someotherdude@evenbetterideas.org
Hey Dude!, I had another great idea!
and so on, including all of the header information and such. I could then parse it and do whatever I want with it.
As the Pragmattic Programmers said, "Keep Knowledge in Plain Text"
-db
I just downloaded it and started setting it up, and found out that there's no imap support (unless it's seriously buried). A 'serious' email client that won't even do imap support? No thanks. There's no way I'm going back to POP3.
If they did support it, I'd certainly consider dumping Netscape/Moz for The Bat.
Anyone I've ever recieved more than N messages from, make a folder for me, and setup the filters to automaticly put messages from that person into that folder.
Also put symbolic links to any messages I've ever sent that person (or list) into that folder.
Why do I say put links?
Ever write a message to multiple friends and you have no idea which folder the message was filtered into? It's either in some random folder for whichever filter was first, or worse there are multiple copies of the message in each persons folder.
I want it all to be automatic, so automatic that magicly my mother's 500+ message InBox is suddenly cleaned up as a series of neat and clear folders.
If it's not automatic, 99% of users (like those who never program their VCR) will never use filters for folders. At most I see people using folders manually. It needs to be all automatic!!
I'd also like all my messages stored as plain text, one file per message, one directory for each folder (like PMMail except use better filenames). I want my mail to be indestructable, and not tied up in anyones database format. Screw mbox or worse the encrypted junk in Outlook. Let the OS do the work! Then I can search for messages, move messages between folders, do all sorts of cool stuff directly to the message base.
SPAM would really, really suck.
Imagine getting a goatse link via psionics.
I prefer opening fewer applications not from the standpoint of inefficiency of the operating system but rather inefficiency of the UI. I'm slowly moving to Trillian (still have all four IM programs plus mIRC at home, but work uses this little wonder) because it's simpler. Outlook 2002 w/PGP installed handles connections to my two home e-mail addresses as well as work and Hotmail (I'd incorporate Yahoo web access if I could), as well as my address book and calendar, which sync to my Visor Deluxe. Central storage, fewer programs, fewer Alt-Tabs.
I've even taken to using the multiple desktop feature in nVidia's new drivers to do main apps (Office, etc) on one desktop, web surfing and design on a second, and programming on a third. Now, if the IM windows would just stay on Desktop #1....
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Don't they understand that people like having atomic systems? Lots of little programs that each provide a separate service. Ever tried uninstalling IE from M$ Windows, or even M$ Messenger? I personally like AIM and Opera, and I can tell you that I needlessly have duplicate services installed.
With Windows partly it's because of Microsoft policy to "integrate" everthing. Microsoft don't want you to have such an "atomic system" because you can make it work the way you want it to... So other software for Windows follows the same kind of design. This may actually have some advantage with Windows, where since process creation is expensive multi-threading tends to be used as an alternative.
Problem is that you then see these same monoliths appearing in unix systems. As either ports or clones of Windows applications.
Lasers Controlled Games!
One of the reasons I like linux is because for many jobs there are tools made just for that job. In some cases there are a group of tools designed to work seamlessly to get a more complex task done. I like this idea. I like small fast well writen apps that work with each other. I have yet to see this to the extent that I am thinking about tho.
I would love a simple e-mail client with the absolute minimum number of features required. Then to make things better plug-ins and helper apps to make the client totaly customizable. So if I wanted all the features listed in the review I could install them. If I wanted diffrent one I would get them.
The perfect email client is one that would have a bunch of peices like legos. Anyone could pick the pieces they like and build there own email client. Heck why stop with email?
I agree, Sylpheed is a supeorior client, pretty much like what balsa would be like if balsa wasn't buggy as hell, and wasn't trying to be a eudora clone and failing.
I havn't tried the Claws add on for Sylpheed yet, but I hear it's good if you like that sort of thing.
The one thing Sylpheed is missing is return reciept. Return reciept may not be something geeks often use, but users at work like to use it a lot, and it's not complicated to implement.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Elm worked fine in 1987 and damn it, it works fine now. Other than a small timezone problem for one hour about 0000 GMT Y2K, its been bug free for 15 years.
The first thing which drives me nuts is that news (usenet) readers and mail readers are completely saparate. Sure, at times they are both integrated into the same product, but they are still conceptually separate. What is so hard to understand in the following statement: being subscribed to a mailing list and tracking a usenet group should be *exactly the same*. And yes, Virginia, even normal E-mail "folders" *need to support threads*. Sigh.
The second thing is having to sort messages to "folders". I'd much rather be able to assign keywords to each message - multiple, independent keywords, both automatically using rules and manually when I read the message - and then view "virtual folders" based on queries on these keywords. Nothing ground breaking here... but I suspect it would take another 10 years until it would become mainstream. Ugh.
My final problem is that my work environment is based on Exchange's calendar so I'm stuck with using Outlook, so I'll die of old age before I see any of this, even if it does get into open-source viewers. Arrgghh!
I might check out the bat based on other comments here, but those two do it for me.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
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).
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.
I have a few tens of thousands of emails filed in around 400 folders in my 550MB Outlook .pst file. (This size is after I strip out almost all attachments!) I manually file them, because Outlook rules are wowefully inadequate.
.pst file. I need to be able to tag files with medadata such as project, business line, and importance, in addition to the standard email headers. I then need folders to exist for each of these categories.
I keep all these emails because they're some of the most valuable organizational information I can have. I search them daily and would be absoultely lost without them.
What I need is a database that pretends to be an Outlook
Given that I've had this need since about 1998, I don't understand why Outlook has not yet delivered. (Outlook 97, Outlook 98, Outlook 2000, Outlook XP... how long do we have to wait!?!)
And please kids, don't tell me to use Linux/Pine/Elm/Mutt/whatever. My office email environment is Exchange, and very much makes use of the scheduling system in addition to email, so I'm stuck with it.
The only thought I've had so far is to set up an Outlook rule to forward a copy of every message I get to one of my Linux boxen, where I could chop it up and insert it into a database... but retrieving these messages would require me to use a second interface, and I need the functionality integrated into Outlook.
But the problem with Outlook is not that long feature list. Presumably they're all used by somebody. And indeed there are a lot of features in Outlook I'd like to be able to use.
Problem is, these features are not well integrated. As with most Microsoft apps, they just pile on the features without any thought as to usability. So it's pretty painful to find the features you want to use and turn off the features you don't.
To make matters worse, MS's response to these issues is totally brainless. They throw in fancy technofixes, such as "Wizards" and "Help Agents" which just make things worse. Or they remove features that some people complain about, without considering that others actually use them. Like the MDI interface: mandatory in Office 97, disabled in Office 2K, optional in Office XP. Duh!
Some of the open source mail clients are promising, but there are so many secondary issues. Many refuse to support rich text, citing security or bandwith issues. (Legitimate concerns, but banning HTML from email is neither a necessary nor a sufficient fix.) Others support only the protocols the authors themselves need. These never seem to include both IMAP and LDAP, two protocols I can't live without.
Attention! POP is out of date! Public LDAP servers are useless (stupid spammers), but a lot of us still use corporate LDAP servers!
I used the Mozilla client for a long time. But they never fixed all the nastier memory leaks. And recently they started adding weird incompatilities to way HTML mail is composed. This in a product that is supposed to be close to 1.0! (After only 3 years.) Enough of that. I'm back to Netscape 4.7.
you've just describe XEmacs' VM mode, very power email client working without any major bugs for years.
The only drawback of Emacs modes: you've gotta use programming. Just general programming skills b/c elisp is very simple and very logical.
The same argument becomes a benefit - you can do virtually everything. You can tune the mode for your preferences or you can integrate several emacs modes to work together or you can create your own mode.
For example, I've integrated VM with IRC and ICQ clients (yes, there are such modes for emacs!) and with diary calendar and with PostgreSQL ORDBMS. The result of such power and flexible integration is barely possible even in M$outlook.
I wish Mozilla would have same extensibility and I hope it will eventaulally, but without elisp it will be not THAT power.
The CNET review started with the Outlook model, which means that there's more to mail than mail. Outlook competes with Notes, which is a database-driven application environment that incidentally includes a truly wretched mail client. Let's leave calendaring, napstering, chat and news to specialized clients and focus on mail!
I like Eudora 3 a lot, but of course it doesn't have a Unix/Linux version. A really nice mail program would do better to start there. KMail's not bad either but again missing some things. A simple wish list:
- Fast user interface, with keyboard shortcuts to move to the next message, delete, etc., without touching the mouse. (I often need to filter through a hundred or more messages, many spam.) [Okay, this is common.]
- Filtering. [Okay, this is common.]
- POP3 and IMAP4 support.
- Good use of screen space. Eudora's overlapping windows are wonderful -- the 3-pane model is more common but takes more screen space.
- With POP3 (this is easier with IMAP but lots of POP3 servers are out there), there should be a "delete after x" option. And it needs tokeep track of what it's already seen. All of the Linux clients I can find are "leave mail on server" or "delete". But with more than one computer (home and office), I want to sync the mail by having both copies of the client get the mail, leaving it on the server just long enough for both to have a chance to get it all. Eudora and Outlook Express both do this on Windows, but it's not in KMail, Outlook, Sylpheed, etc. This is a showstopper! I have to boot back to Windows in order to run Eudora just to control the mail (my Linux clients are "leave mail on server").
- Cross-platform Linux/Unix and Windows support using the SAME mail files! (Thus the Linux version has to run against VFAT mail files.) This way the user can boot up either OS and access the same mail, rather than maintain two copies (see above about "leave mail on server" and multiply the problem by different OSs as well as by computers. I keep three copies of most mail because of this, office, home Windows and home Linux.) Yes, I recognize that Windows and Linux disagree on ASCII conventions, but a Windows app *can* be written to use a Linux-standard database.
- Optional display of HTML mail, without making external references (phoning home to spammers) or executing anything (viruses) unless you explicitly say to. Default send should be plain text.
Here's one!. Maybe a little long on design and short on implementation, but overall sounds like a good idea to me.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I think you miss the point. If mass-return-spamming started taking place, those who administer systems condoning or not actively working against spamming would have to act. There just ain't enough bandwidth to go around. Responsible ISPs would rapidly learn to bar any user who generated thousands of anti-spam complaints. Irresponsible IPs who generated a similar amount of traffic would rapidly get blocked by those ISPs who have better things to do with their time. Simple as that, really.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Just registering my opinion, not actually adding to the conversation.
sic transit gloria mundi
A long while ago (pre-win2k), I used a little program called Becky! (official site here), a shareware Windows email client. It has the best interface I've seen yet. ...however, it doesn't get updates frequently and it's primary language is Japanese. Oh, and it's not free beer let alone free speech.
...and you can't beat Pine for remote access (unless you're a fan of webmail, and even then you're hard pressed for something free).
I'm currently using Pine for receiving and Mozilla for sending. Once I get an IMAP server up on my linux box, I'll use Mozilla for mail at home and Pine for remote. Personally, I think this is the optimal solution; with your own personal IMAP server, you NEVER have to worry about switching email clients and converting everything.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Hey, great ideas. Point me to where I can get the source code and I'll do that for ya. ;)
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
When I'm sitting down to compose some e-mails, you bet I like to have one view open: for my e-mails. The distraction of seeing everything conceivable about my meetings, chatting, tasks, etc., would be an inconvenience.
HOWEVER, when I'm done with my e-mails, I'd like to be able to "step back" out of that e-mail-centric view into an all-around overview of what's going on, that would include recent e-mails, tasks, appointments and instant messaging. Today that's difficult to do.
So maybe what I would like to see is a variation of CNET's proposal: we could have a view where you see everything and everything (that you want), and allow you to "zoom" into a particular workspace to get a more details overview of, say, your inbound e-mails, etc., and perhaps a cursory notification pane that covers events in every other section of the application.
My US$0.02.
Of course not.
Well, I guess if it really was one of those 'of course' things, I wouldn't be responding, would I? :-)
Users know only one thing. "I want this." This doesn't just apply to software, it applies to any industry, from cars, services, whatever. Users only know what they want, and they typically want the stupidest stuff.
It takes people who understand the problem domain and the issues involved to actually make solutions work. This is why joe-6-pack doesn't make solutions. When they do, they make Homer's Car.
They've committed several 'crimes' on their wishlist. The most prominent is that they used Outlook as a launching point. Good god. Outlook shouldn't be a launching point for anything, especially a Dream Email-PIM system.
Besides that (I'll admit that I've got several grudges with Outlook), they've ignored problems with scalability and configurability. It's easy to dictate "I want this here, and it should do this," but it's much harder to decide how it's supposed to adapt to varying amounts of data and user workflows. The split email view is bad on so many counts- it makes showing subjects and dates harder, and what if you have 5 email accounts (such as I do) that you need to monitor? It just doesn't work. You need a better solution.
And there's the whole issue of feature bloat. I'd say reviewers are fairly savvy with the software they use (if not, they don't deserve their job). But a new users (and many not-so-new users; basically whenever anyone encounters something outside of their knowledge domain, which anything that they're not used to working on) have to take a blind eye to 90% of the features of feature-bloated software. It's information overload; so much that the new user doesn't know where to start, or what half of those things are useful for.
It's just the 90/10 rule; 90% of the work is done by 10% of the code- or interface. Don't put the rest of the 90% of the interface up front, it's just not useful.
For people born and bread on Microsoft Office, it would be hard to picture another way of working. But it's not for those people to decide; it's up to the user interface designers to make those decisions and come up with appropriate solutions.
That's the most important factor when writing software. Most programmers and managers (and reviewers) completely miss that fact, and we all end up working with complicated (== $$ on training), inefficient (== $$ on time), feature-rich software designs (== $$ for MS and people who support it, like that NT sys admin at work you love so much) that don't help the user.
UI designers exist for a good reason. Good ones understand their problem domain better than anyone else, and are best suited to make solutions for it. To get anyone else to do the job is akin to putting non-tech people in charge of digital copyright laws. It just doesn't make sense.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
Ooh, I don't like their email client they want. It's got too much crap in it. I like stand alone utilities. Then if something breaks it doesn't break everything!! Oops, my email client is screwed up, now I can't IM my friends or view my calender. Bah!
:) Maybe a letter head type thing for business emails.
Hmm, as for other email clients. In Windows I'd have to say Outlook Express is the best. Unfortunately it does too much stuff and is prone to problems, but I've accepted that because it's really easy to use and maintain.
Netscape's I didn't care much for. It was sluggish and a little unwieldly.
I used to like Eudora but then it got bloated and more awkward.
In linux I liked using Mutt, and I used Balsa. I never used the one in Gnome or KDE, I hear those are good. I might try in a couple months.
What I want in an email client is easy folder and mail management. Spell checking or connection to a spell checker. Address book or connection to one. Easy multi-email address capabilities. The possibility of locking email folders/accounts. So that I can have one desktop running for multiple people and still keep their email private. Easy PGP. And it should only read/send text!! Stupid pictures, html, scripts and crap. They should be attachments. Email is supposed to be fast, you shouldn't have to worry about placing pictures, backgrounds and junk. A button to remove html tags would be handy in that
I don't think I'm asking too much. Maybe someday I'll make one if I ever get off my ass.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
telnet pop3.concentric.net:110
:(
:(
Amen! I always wondered why all the decent mail clients don't have a "view headers" or "view 50 lines of the message" function, so I can see what the bloody hell the 5Mb mail that's clogging mai mailbox is about. I'm talking about connecting via the GSM phone at 9600 apd POP3-ing my mail from the mail server...
For the younger audience, to transfer 1Mb at 9600 takes roughly 1000 seconds, which is 16 minutes 40 seconds. Thus 5Mb takes... forever.
The way out?
telnet mail.company.com 110
USER me
PASS mypassword
STAT
HEAD 1 50
HEAD 2 50
Nice, isn't it?
-- No sig today
BeOS just stored mail as a file with attributes, I just used BFS queries to sort my mail, one for new mail, that was personally to me, then one for each mailing list I was subscribing to, worked beutyfully... Oh BeOS how elegant you were....
is Microsoft Outlook with a bunch of plugins. I rather suspect that they've never used anything except Outlook and Outlook Express for serious work. Their "wish list" is almost all user interface doodles and twiddles.
Problems with Outlook and OE are obvious to /.ers:
I've considered writing my own mail/news client, but it seems like an awful lot of work for relatively little return -- current programs are Almost Good Enough. Anyway, what I'd look for:
If the architecture is done properly, it should be possible to add all the user interface twiddles that anybody could want (icons for the sender showing their Webcam?), while keeping a solid base system that will handle the mail properly.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
A little birdie tells me that this feature [ignoring html] *might* be included in Mozilla 1.0
Mozilla doesn't yet have full MHTML support in mail (and has no MHTML support in the browser). MHTML is/will be the standard in multi-part messages, and once it integrated, there should be an option to view text over html.
Here's the feature request for MHTML improvement in Mozilla Mail.
Here's the feature request for MHTML support in the Mozilla browser.
If you want an estimate of when it should be done, look towards mid-May for the Mozilla1.1alpha release.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
anybody know of a good (ie comprehensive) comparison of these three?
... I would LOVE to switch to a GPL mail client over Pine's don't-touch-me OSS license.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
End of story. Eudora just failed test zero.
Easy enough to demonstrate: on a Windows machine send yourself an HTML file called "foo.html". When it comes back, observe that the file is now called "foo.htm".
<plan9>stupid, stupid, stupid</plan9>
I dimly recall there's some funny business with Eudora changing or discarding some of the headers too, but I was so offended by the first thing I found that I wiped Eudora off my disk at once.
I use mutt as my email client. I would really like to see a X version of mutt.
I have a cron that archives my mail directory each month. I just makes gzip files of whatever is in my Mail folder, and dates them.
I then can use grepmail to find emails...
grepmail 'Jon.*project x' companyx*
That will find any email with Jon and project x in all the companyx files.
grepmail is a great tool for someone that has lots of email. I have over 2gb going back four years.
For spam, I use spamassassin.
The above is not worth reading.
I have seen customizable button bars that can have any function added to it, but I have never seen the same for context menus. Why not? Everybody would want different functions available on their context menus (I personally like keeping them lean, with only what I use often).
That almost happened. When I worked there, I was bugging them to port Eudora to Linux. (I've been a Linux user for a long time, and essentially had to use Windows since I had to use Eudora.) Well, one day a PHB type (sorry, John...) comes into my office and says "We'd like to talk about what it would take to get Eudora working on Linux." w00t!
So I go searching for someone to do the port. Among my searches, I would up talking to Loki Software. The Linux game company that just went joysticks up. So I brought them in (they were in Tustin, QCOM was in San Diego, so it was a easy thing). We had them sign NDA's, the works. Scott Draeker came, as did two other geeks. I had fun talking to them. Way smart people. One of them was a GNOME user, the other KDE. I got them going on that. Kind of a troll, but I needed an ice-breaker. :-)
Anyway, I burnt a CD with Mac and Win Eudora source and gave it to them. They looked at both and said that the Windows source could be ported in like 3 months. I was a happy camper.
Then, doom. Money got weird. The ads were selling, but there were internal QCOM politics. I can't go into it, but if I had talked to Loki three, four months previous, there likely would have been a Linux Eudora Pro. And Loki might still be in business (since we were going to pay them a boatload of money). And I would have been happy. But now I make do with Pine and Kmail.
This is all an interesting story, actually. I should write it up one day. I still have friends at Qualcomm, though, so I'll have to wait.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
The mail client that comes with Mac OS X is pretty good. The main reason I like it so much is because it's so simple. It doesn't have many features, but it seems to have all the features I want. Filtering, IMAP over SSL, ending HTML Image-Downloading. It's 6.2MB. If it could check my Hotmail account, I'd never have to run IE, though...
Anyone have any complaints about Mail.app?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Suppose I have a 100K memo with a few charts. It contains sensitive information, so I need to be pretty careful who sees it. An email server isn't the most secure environment, but a decently maintained one is secure enough for this purpose. Now, if I follow your rules, I must
- Create the rich text file.
- Upload it to an HTTP or file server.
- Unless the server is only accesible by the people I want to see the memo, I must secure the file somehow -- encryption, HTTP passwords, whatever.
- Notify the recipients.
Then each recipient must download the file, use the authorization I sent them, and view it. Depending on how I did, this can be pretty complicated, especially if they're not familiar with all the aps involved.Do you really consider this a productive use of people's time? Bandwidth is expensive, but it's not that expensive.
Obviously there have be limits on the bandwidth hogged by email. But that's a restriction best done by individual system adminsitrators -- not imposed by the prejudice of email client developers.
OK, now I'm really confused. Why are a few HTML tags in the message itself Evil, but OK in attachments? And why are large rich-text messages a waste of bandwith, but even larger PDF and Word attachments -- with their style sheets, embedded fonts, and God Knows what else -- cool? Redundant of me to address this point again, but I didn't want to be accused of quoting you out of context. So I'll just repeat: web pages are not suitable for a lot of day-to-day communications.I think the basic issue here is a question of focus. Yes, there are problems with the feature bloat in email clients: bandwidth, security, usability. But when we argue about these problems, we need to talk about the problems themselves. Instead, everybody seems to get all religious about the features that happen to be associated with these problems. Some of these features are useful, and banning them is neither necessary nor sufficient to fix anything.
And this is good how?
What's really frustrating is the attitude of service providers. Their ads almost always say, "POP support!" Rarely do they mention IMAP. Sometimes they don't support IMAP. Sometimes they just don't consider it worth mentioning. Makes life difficult.
The funny thing is, I've been online since the 80's, I owned a data center for 5 years, yet I have NEVER used IMAP. No job I've had used an IMAP account (either POP or MS Exchange or Lotus Notes), and the 5 accounts I do have a re standard POP3. Where can I get an IMAP account for cheap?
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Ok, I'm biased because I know a lot of people who work/used to work on the project. But TWIG has always been a great mailreader, if you're into the web-based mail reader sort of thing. It's a PHP-based client that, in addition to mail, it has newsgroup capability, a scheduler, and a bunch of other keen things.
TWIG links:
twig.screwdriver.net
TWIG on Freshmeat.
Also, be sure to query 'twig' on sourceforge to see a few other projects that involve TWIG.
Now then, if you read the official definition of text/richtext, you'll note that it is an SGML application! Simpler than most, and implementable by somebody who doesn't know SGML, but it's still SGML.
Anyway, just being an SGML application isn't what made such a mess of HTML. Most of HTML's problems stem from the difficultty of getting all those web hackers to follow basic markup concepts. If they'd managed to force people to treat HTML as an SGML app we could have avoided all the compatibility issues, browser wars, etc. Yeah, I know, that's pure fantasy. But my point is that HTML's problems have nothing to do with its SGML origins.
It probably would have been a good thing if email clients had focused on using text/richtext instead of HTML. But once web technology took off, there was no chance of that happening. (Kind of ironic that the same RFC defined both text/richtext and the means of its destruction: MIME, which allowed developers to create HTML-enabled clients.) And in any case, the limitations of text/richtext would have become a burden right about now.
mutt.
I mean, the real answer is SPM: Sendmail (OK: or Qmail, whatever...), procmail, and mutt.
Total control.
You are in charge.
Not Unca Bill...
Not the spammers...
Not the virus-writers...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I'll avoid getting into specific things I hate about Exchange, Outlook, even sendmail, of which, there are many. But I just can't stay out of this discussion.
:)
.forward, It can be done on Exchange, but requires administrative access.
/. community have even HEARD of PGP???).
1) Floating PIM pane: Just what I need, ANOTHER floating toolbar to get in my way. What happens when they start making pop-up ads that look like this thing?
2) Split-view in-box: Sounds like you should have separate e-mail accounts to begin with. Most companies 'officially' frown on personal e-mail at work, but I'll grant there could be some worthwhile uses of this.
3) Built-in instant messaging: you can put your MSN messenger in MY e-mail client when you shove it up my cold, dead ass.
4) Calendar-linked autoresponse: It is a widely-accepted principle of security that auto-responses are a BAD IDEA. You don't want to tell a potential hacker when someone important will be out of the building, and more importantly, when to expect them back.
5) Integrated PGP encryption: You want your e-mail to be readable on everyone's clients? How long do you suppose it'll take for Microsoft to re-write the standard so that you have to use Outlook Express to read messages sent with their version of MSN-PGP???
6) Spam autoreporting: already discussed in a previous post (don't you dare moderate me -1 redundant
7) Mousover contact info: this is all so very GUI-oriented... at least it's "optional".
8) Smart e-mail notification: this is just too frivolous for me. A minor improvement, and probably not too hard to do, but nothing that would make my daily routine much more exciting.
9) All-powerful right-clicking: one out of ten ain't bad. Of course, this, like most of the other wish-list items here, is for GUI's only.
10) Easy-acess message templates. Not a bad idea, but isn't this kind of thing already available/reproducible?
--------------
Here's a short list of things *I'd* like to see:
1) Ability to turn off ALL scripting, previews, etc: no more pesky viruses.
2) E-mails sent are completely standard, text-only: I am so sick of receiving e-mails with MS-TNEF attachments
3) E-mail client that can strip out all HTML code from a message: just give me the quick-n-dirty text, please
4) Standard, easy import-export of address book, messages, calendar items, and account settings: I've seen older versions of outlook and outlook express that couldn't handle each-others' data. Numerous times, I've seen installations of Outlook Express that refused to export anything, merely reporting an 'unknown error'.
5) e-mail clients that don't step on each others' toes: how many times have I seen outlook break netscape communicator or vice-versa?
6) EVERY option controllable: I'm a control freak. I want to be able to turn on/off everything in the program, from line wraps to MIME-encoding. Even Pine won't let me do everything I want.
7) automatic forwarding of incoming mails while keeping a copy: I never could seem to get this working with a
Why does this article complain about MS adding too many unneeded features and then suggest so many that many people wouldn't need (How many people outside the
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
good question since Polarbar Mailer supports LDAP and Mozilla/Netscape does too. Getting my PDA or PMT (Personal Mobility Tool) to sync with a local LDAP server would be the only/last thing to get going.....
If this is such a good idea, could be, do the standard distributions start this or install it by default? Heck, the standard Netscape/Mozilla installation should be preset to use it too.
If all the other browsers are already able to use LDAP and the emailers (Kmail, pine, etc) then this is a no-brainer.
Who has experience with this?
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
How about "follows 9-year-old RFCs such as 1521 to the recommended level" and "doesn't automatically execute viruses in fifty different ways, with exciting new exploits discovered daily" before you start wishing for gee-whiz-bang new features of dubious usefulness?
You should be able to get email and read it, without the text appearing as an attachment and the attachments wiping your hard drive, before you start worrying about icorporating every program on your system into your email interface.
Well, if you're stuck with Exchange, you can still use Linux. ;-)
Just take a look at Evolution
It's as close to Outlook as any application can be, but runs on Linux and now it can act as an Exchange client. Yes, that means you can use Evolution with Exchange for everything: e-mail, calendar, etc., while still being able to use it as a regular POP3/IMAP client if you wish.
Cool, huh?
> Procmail's "language" is actually pretty logical, once you get past weird markers like "0:" and "*".
:)
:)
Yes, it's logical, but that doesn't make it good
Have a look at the code sometime; especially with whitespace highlighting on to see how it's not even been indented properly, never mind properly commented or refactored. It's riddled with goto's, magic numbers, and is optimized for parsing by removing as much whitespace as possible.
Just looking at it was enough to make me install maildrop (which has much cleaner code).. I've yet to actually start using it though
> Is there some open-source mail filter that doesn't reparse its rules on each run?
Exim's filter stuff probably fits into this category, along with the filter languages for the other MTA's.
I really like a lot of the features in the Mozilla mail client. If they would just fix all those sky-fucking memory leaks, Mozilla could claim to be more stable than anything from Microsoft. But not only are they not making progress on this issue, they're still tweaking the way HTML is generated when you compose email. Last time I tried it (about a week ago), I got HTML that was very proprietary, very non-W3C compliant, and (of course) didn't display correctly in most clients. RIP Mozilla.
That last feature is very basic. I can't think of any other GUI email client that doesn't have it. I'm suprised that there's anybody willing to use an email client that makes browsing so difficult.
Anyway, you're right about all these issues, and it's unfortunately true that most email clients don't even try to address them.
(Assuming of course, you actually need to use Usenet. I consider it an obsolete system that survives by pure inertia. But that's another discussion.)
You know, TrueSync is capable of making the Exchange calendar accessible to most clients. Of course, your boss is likely to say, "Why should we invest in this? What's wrong with Outlook?"
OK, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you're wrong. Maybe we're both wrong. (Perhaps we could ask Borenstein?) But I'm quite confident in disputing your claim that early HTML wasn't an SGML app. The existence of a DTD is neither here nor there. A DTD isn't the only way to write a formal SGML specification -- and a formal specification isn't an essential part of an SGML app. Many SGML apps rely on simple prose specifications. You don't need a formal specification to feed a document to an SGML parser. You just need to follow the conventions of whatever SGML subset the parser supports. And of course, you need to provide a back end that does something useful with the parser's productions.
(The main purpose of formal specifications is to validate SGML docs, so you know they won't make your back end choke. Of course, B-L didn't consider validation to be very important. An HTML backend is supposed to make a reasonable guess and move on. Problem is, these guesses soon become "features" required by thousands of HTML docs...)
And I strongly disagree with your characterization of SGML. Something isn't "lunacy" just because it's complicated and hard to understand. Is Computer Science "lunacy" because it's based on theories beyond the understanding of of most computer users (including a lot of programmers!)? Is a CPU or VM "lunacy" because its object codes are hopelessly arcane and complex?
Something is useful if it provides a basis for making things that people can use -- and usually these are people who don't know the basic principles of all the underlying technologies. (Even if they're smart enough and have the necessary technical training, they probably don't have the time!) Thus you can use a computer, even if you're never heard of "computability" or "the stopping problem". You can use a compiler to write software even if you can't read assembly language. And you can use SGML technology without understanding the SGML specification -- you just need to understand the particular SGML app that you're using.
Indeed, SGML is more useful than it every was. Look at Web Services, SOAP, post-HTML web browsers... "Wait am minute," I hear you protesting, "That's XML, not SGML." But XML is just a carefully defined subset of SGML, and all the tools for working with it are inherited from SGML, or are developments of SGML ideas.
I think we'll get a good email client eventually. There doesn't seem to be a lot of market incentive, but that just slows things down a little.
CNET took Outlook as the basis for discussion. Which is already hopelessly feature-bloated. We settled that way back. Now we're talking about real email clients!