The mail client of your dreams
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
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]
Tags: Apple Mail, email, Junk, mail.app, offline, searching, tags, to do list