The iPhone: What email client is that?
Of course, there was only one real question of any importance during the Keynote yesterday: What email client is iPhone using?
Apple doesn’t call it Apple Mail in the same way as it calls the phone’s browser Safari. It describes the email app as,
…a rich HTML email client that fetches your email in the background from most POP3 or IMAP mail services and displays photos and graphics right along with the text.
Is it a stripped-down version of Apple Mail all done over with eye-candy or something else? What is “rich HTML”?
After watching the Keynote a few times and viewing the videos in the new iPhone section 
of the Apple web site, I think that that “rich HTML” is a term designed to appeal to Windows users. Mail.app users are used to the distinction between “Rich Text” and HTML email, and Mail’s ability to compose only in the former whilst happily displaying the latter.
There is nothing in the Keynote or videos to suggest anything more advanced (or depraved, depending on your point of view about HTML email) than Mail.app’s existing capabilities.
There is no composing in HTML and nothing on display that suggests more advanced HTML rendering. The only list I can see is marked with hyphens, not bullets, although presumably it wasn’t composed on an iPhone:
So I am guessing that is not a new custom-made client but a cut-down version of Mail.app, “Mail Mobile” as it were. What do you think?
Australians won’t get their hands on one until sometime in 2008, so someone else will know the answer before I do.
Tags: Apple Mail, Email Client, HTML, iphone, keynote, mail.app, mwsf, rich textRelated posts
January 11th, 2007 at 1:18 am
My guess is it’s perhaps a webkit (ie like Safari) based app? Yes you’re right what exactly is “rich” html!
January 11th, 2007 at 2:25 am
I think there’s a very good chance that what we’re seeing has the guts of Mail.app underneath.
If this thing is really tied to real OS X as much as I suspect it is, than Interface Builder is going to make life very easy for devlopers. Very little non gui code will have to be rewritten if people wrote their application using MVC properly. Basically, you may just be able to recompile in XCode for a new target and then slap a iPhone NIB file into the .app and presto, you’ve got a port.
If this is true, I’m sure Apple doesn’t compile all the options in for applications. But the idea of having a common code base is really awesome!
January 11th, 2007 at 2:48 am
My guess is that Leopard will hit the market before this iPhone, and that the “OS X” running on the iPhone will be a flavor of Leopard.
My second guess is that Apple will not reveal too much info about the software on this iPhone before the release of Leopard.
Here’s a question: will Apple drop the word “Mac” from the OS running on Macintoshes? Some reporters didn’t notice that the iPhone OS is called OS X.
January 11th, 2007 at 4:35 am
I’ve heard that a more robust html feature-set is coming in the next release of OSX, Leopard. Since the iPhone’s USA release date is 6 months out, presumably after the release of Leopard, it’s possible that the new Mail features will trickle down to the phone prior to its debut. Just a wild guess.
January 11th, 2007 at 5:04 am
They’ve looped Yahoo! in on the email side, so maybe it’s some custom kit that ties in with the new Y! Mail beta?
January 11th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
This Yahoo push imap mail thing sounds like bullshit or marketing spin. Most IMAP servers have IDLE function so any mail client (like the Symbian mail client) can have push email. I have push email on my Symbian S60 phone from 2 barefoot ISP imap mailboxes.
January 11th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
“Mail.app users are used to the distinction between “Rich Text†and HTML email, and Mail’s ability to compose only in the former whilst happily displaying the latter.”
Actually, Tim, Mail has changed what it does.
At one time the standard for adding formatting to email was text/enriched as defined in RFC1896:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1896.html
You can read a short summary on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_text
The problem here was Netscape (see the linked article at wiki). They wanted to crash into the mail client market but had no parser for enriched text, so they used their HTML parser instead - with a number of undesirable results, some of which have been solved since, some of which continue to cause problems.
Mail, like the NeXT mail application before it, composed in text/enriched up to and including Panther. In the Preferences that was indicated by a dropdown reading “Rich Text”. That dialog still reads the same way in Tiger’s Mail, but now if you select “Rich Text”, Mail composes in a form of HTML.
January 12th, 2007 at 12:05 am
Jayzee: you’re very right, Jobs just called the iPhone’s OS “OS X”, which most people took for shorthand to mean “Mac OS X”, which then created an expected degree of bleating (especially but not limited exclusively to the more rabid fanboys) that “The iPhone runs Mac OS X, w00t!! It’s got widgets and everything, all the power of a desktop Mac OS in your hand, no cut-down Windows CE” etc.
Of course, now that the dust has settled, a few folk are breathing a little deeper and realising that this just ain’t possible, aswell as that it’d make no sense (unless you want to install InDesign on your iPhone?) — and that at best it’s a severely yet intelligently pared-back core or kernel, or even a different OS (such as a pint-sized *nix) written to look and work as much like the _Mac_ OS X as needs be… in much the same way that Jobs replaced the MacOS with OS X, which was an all-new OS but cannily engineered to look and work as much like the MacOS as was necessary.
David
January 13th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Having had a chance to play with the iPhone up close & personal (albeit very briefly) and ask a few questions on it (as part of coverage for another site), I am able to report that it definitely does not compose HTML or rich text mail.
It will of course view rich-text/HTML mail, and even allow existing messages to be forwarded, but there is nothing in the interface to provide this.
As for the Yahoo Mail connection that another comment mentioned, I’m not entirely sure of the internal workings of the Yahoo Mail scenario (and didn’t have time to ask), I suspect there is something slightly more to it. Yahoo was also the first e-mail service to provide “push” e-mail for the new Blackberry Web Client. IMAP IDLE obviously offers this capability, but I suspect there may be something more than this internally.
January 13th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Jesse. So it does look like a cut-back version of Mail?
Send me the link to the coverage on another site so that I can possibly give it and you a plug.
January 14th, 2007 at 2:02 am
Our time with it was very limited, so we didn’t get into as much depth as we would have liked. It certainly looks very much like a pared-down version of Apple Mail, however. Whether that’s an indication of the same code-base or simply the same interface I’m really not certain.
January 25th, 2007 at 2:52 am
Just noticed on the Surfin Safari blog - http://webkit.org/blog/?p=87
“WebKit is also used for the iPhone’s rich HTML mail capabilities.”
November 15th, 2007 at 5:13 am
This Mail client is very rudimentary. For power users, used to working on the BlackBerry, it is not even considered functional. There is no sorting, searching functionality and no way to skip thru messages very quickly. NOT A BUSINESS TOOL, Great UI though.