waffle

It’s all around again – the concept of the email client that doesn’t suck. I’m using Apple Mail, and I’m reasonably satisfied, but not entirely. I’m willing to throw in with other people to help this happen. At this stage, though, the scope must be established or it will fail.

To any takers that will want to build this, here are my personal goals, would I do this alone (in my equally ficticious copious free time, naturally):

• Make it fast.
• Make it open.
• Make it look pretty.
• Make it usable.
• Start with something. (I recommend Rentzsch’s project. It’s in his public redshed SVN repo, and it’s called Maillot.)
• Support IMAP.
• Support SMTP.
• If at all possible, try to support POP.
• Support SSL with any of the above.
• Build in decent HTML handling, but make it a master switch in the app to deal with Text or Text+HTML. Email is best in text, but for the millions of people that use Outlook and for which it is “email”, not “just another email client which my boss tells me I’ll have to use”, email is rich text.
• Build in hooks for processing received messages in scripts right from the start. (Spam filtering, but also other stuff.)
• Build in rules and filtering, like all other mail apps have. (If possible, make this use the hooks mentioned above – self-reliance keeps you honest.)
• Support Growl.
• Automatically decode winmail.dat files.
• Support threads. (I prefer Apple Mail style – simple collation – but some prefer jwz-style – nested.)
• Build in the “Outlook view” (folders on extreme left, mail list on left as thin column but with multiple rows for each message, reading pane for rest).
• Build in “syntax highlighting” for quote levels.
• Make filtering the message list without doing a full-on search easy.
• Load as little as you can from the underlying data store.
• Implement smart archiving of individual folders – just show (the x most recent messages / messages from the x most recent (weeks / months / years)) in a specific folder. Make retrieving the rest blindingly simple. Disable this in the inbox.
• Integrate with the system address book and calendar.
• Make it possible to associate contacts with email accounts. (Say you’ll only ever want to send a message to this person from your job email, or your personal email. The app would prevent you from circumventing this.)
• Using a plugin system, allow automatic offshoring of old email. Continuously relocate old mail to another place. (Say, S3.) As far as possible, keep the index, but move the actual emails. (Thanks to Bob Sanders.)
• Conversely, allow redundant storage using those same plugins. (New mail? Automatic Subversion checkin.)
• Allow a Gmail-like message list view of several emails (or a whole thread) at once.
• Support stuff like PGP and other encryption right out of the box; if possible, both for sending and receiving.