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:

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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.