The mail client of your dreams
Program co-Chair for O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention 
, Allison Randall, is the latest figure to produce a list of features for her dream email client (following TextMate developer Allan Odgaard and the celebrities in Hawk Wing’s “Talking Mail.app” series).
She’s called her piece “the problem of email”, and it’s not hard to see why:
When I say “my inbox is out of control”, people respond “Yeah, mine too. I spent 5 hours this weekend and knocked it down from 3,000 messages to 50 messages and I feel so much better.” I have over 20,000 messages spread out over 5+ inboxes. This is after I declared defeat 5 months ago, dumped everything into an archive, and started fresh. This is after I unsubscribed from all but the critical mailing lists (Perl lists and internal company mailing lists). This is after spending 3-5 hours every day working on email, and sometimes spending all day on it.
This leads to her to list the eight features in an email client that would help her “be faster and more effective at managing the email I’ve got”.
By my count, Apple Mail only does half of them.
[Thanks, Scott and Bruce]
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Tags: Apple Mail, email, Junk, mail.app, offline, searching, tags, to do list
October 24th, 2006 at 9:57 pm
Do you plan to link to Allison’s article?
October 24th, 2006 at 10:08 pm
Yes, I did. That was more or less the point of the post :)
Thanks for letting me know.
October 25th, 2006 at 12:34 am
Some of what Allison is describing is not an email problem, it’s a corporate culture problem. No one can manage, in any meaningful way, the amount of email that Allison gets, even with the mail client of their dreams. If she herself really has to look at and respond to, or at least know the contents of, that many emails, then she needs assistants — her job load is heavier than it should be. And here’s the more universal problem: companies that don’t place restrictions on the to-all mail. Maybe 10% of the people in every organization think that every message they write has to be copied to the entire organization, either because they think they’re that important or because they’re trying to cover their asses. Or because they want to sell their car or advertise their garage sale. I am blessed to work for an organization whose chief IT officer has to approve personally every to-all message, which means that I get almost no such messages, and that alone makes my mailbox infinitely easier to manage. So, at least sometimes, what needs to be addressed is not the technical capabilities of email clients but rather the bad email usage habits of human beings.
October 25th, 2006 at 8:58 am
Alan wrote:
That sounds like a very clever system!
I am reminded of a comment by Tim Berners-Lee (I think) that the Internet hasn’t made us smarter (as some people think).
All it has done is make more information available to people. It hasn’t taught them how to use it more wisely or manage it more efficiently.
October 31st, 2006 at 10:05 pm
[...] Remember Allison Randal and her overflowing inbox? [...]