Brent Simmons is mad as hell and not going to take it any more — let’s make an email client that won’t suck. He started the email-init mail discussion list for the purposes of hosting a discussion and hopefully giving someone fodder to kickstart an open source email client.
I’m a bit more optimistic in these kinds of discussions since Atom evolved out of Sam Ruby’s project wiki to define a weblog post. It took years, names, flames and RFC committees, but it got out there and it may even be winning.
So far, it seems as if the emphasis is on the practicalities, in a very literal way. I have two reflections on that:
An email client is like a drill. You need a hole in the wall. A drill is probably the best way to go, but drills have been notoriously cumbersome. Recently, a new kind of drill arrived with which people are much more pleased. But the discussion won’t stop about what could be added to the drill, or how, if you’re going to take away your current drill, you must assemble a new drill that’s fundamentally equal, except perhaps for the bits you don’t use yourself, for there to be a hole in the wall.
I say, start with a hole in the wall and work backwards.
Larry Wall said many interesting things about defining Perl 6, but the best was probably that all the proposals he got was written with the expectation that Perl would remain Perl 5, except for just that proposal’s delta. Larry took all the proposals to heart and weighed their inclusions, but he also thought about what their proposals meant. For example, when people asked him to fix various flaws in regexes, he took a long look at regexes and invented a new form of them that kept the benefits of the old regexes, fixed or never had the flaws pointed out and were great and applicable in new ways.
I don’t mean that Perl 6 should be held up as the ideal project or development model for email-init. But ideas are cheap, and imaginations are limited.
I’m terribly interested in this subject, so I will end by linking to my own inaugural list message, where I talk about where I think email clients fail today on a higher plane.
What do you think about web based email. I have used Thunderbird for years with IMAP support. Recently I reinstalled my OS and didn’t bother installing Thunderbird, using web based email instead. Because I was using IMAP the experience is almost the same as having a separate client. I’ll see how I go.
By Chris · 2010.01.17 07:14
The obvious upshot is that you don’t have to sync contacts back and forth. Webmail’s good enough for most uses that people really can just use that.
It’s not just that webmail’s less capable than desktop mail, it’s that it’s less flexible. Flexibility is a big cause of mail client suck.
By Jesper · 2010.01.17 20:40