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 text

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Gabor Cselle has posted some examples of innovative email client design which break the three-pane “Folder -> Email list -> Selected Message” design straight-jacket, popularised by Outlook (and now also available in Mail.app).

The central problem with email clients, he suggests, is not getting rid of Junk emails; it’s learning how to deal more cleverly and efficiently with what’s left:

Today, we seem to be at a point where it seems like we might be able to solve the spam problem. But the problem of figuring out which of the non-spam emails is important, and what it relates to, still exists.

He presents three creative attempts to solve that problem.

TaskMaster , developed by XEROX at PARC in 2003, puts your tasks at the top of the hierarchy, with emails and attachments related to that task grouped underneath:

Bifrost from Lotus Research organises email on the basis of who sent it, rather like Microsoft’s SNARF project. It relies on you to nominate important contacts and organise contacts by their various relationships to you. After that, email is orgnaised for you in a “social” or relationship-based hierarchy.

Lastly he considers “cool features” like contact maps and thread arcs in ReMail from IBM , both of which structure your emails or contacts in more useful ways than the folder-email-selected email model:

Your mind does stop for a minute when you read something like this.

You suddenly realise how much time you spend making the three-tiered model work for your needs. You get to imagine for a moment what it would be like if the email client worked for you rather than you for it.

Tags: Apple Mail, deisgn, email, Email Client, mail.app, outlook, Productivity, three-pane, UI design, usability

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Jim Mock at SoupNazi.org writes about his experience of using Mail.app and Entourage with Exchange Server. Especially with an Exchange Server that has IMAP access turned off.

He writes about three reasons to dislike Entourage (”the bastard step-brother of Outlook”) — anti-aliased fonts, forced line-wrapping at 76 characters and default top posting.

And he begs the Apple Mail development team to build MAPI support into a future version of Mail.app so that “people who work for a company where their retarded IT department has IMAP access turned off” can still use a decent email client.

I feel his pain, naturally, but I could read posts like this all day.

Tags: Email Client, entourage, Exchange, imap, mail.app, MAPI, retarded IT department

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