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]mail.app, apple mail, junk, tags, email, offline, to-do list, searching

Tags: Apple Mail, email, Junk, mail.app, offline, searching, tags, to do list

The hunt for useful apps to post on Hawk Wings often produces strange results.

Sometimes I come across things that are worthy but just “too niche”, even for a site that occupies a niche in a niche market, like a plugin that allows customers of a Swiss cell phone company to send SMSes from Address Book.

Sometimes I come across something distasteful like eMail Ripper , an app that extracts email addresses from files, folders, web sites and text files. There must be a legitimate use for this. I just can’t think of one.

Sometimes I come across something wonderful and weird like FaithConverter (“the premier theological plagiarism solution for Mac OS X”), an app that automatically translates religious texts between thirty different faiths, including Christianity, Buddhism, Communism, Druidism, Islam, Linux, MacEvangelism, Scientology, Thatcherism and Veganism. (It doesn’t do cartoons.)

This is very entertaining but hard to link convincingly with Mail.app, so staying “on topic” rules out giving it a mention.

Sometimes I come across something half-formed and mysterious. It might be a winner. It might be a goose.

Such a thing is Inbox from Midnight Beep Softworks, “pre-released” last week. (Don’t visit if you are on dial-up. Slow as molasses.)

The web site features some alluring screenshots of an app that promises to be:

a fully automated utility for gathering new things you need to be tracking, to help you get them off your mind. Then for processing all that “noise” into useful projects, contexts, and priorities. And finally presenting a fully managed action list of what you could be doing, should be doing, and might want to be doing.

It not only tracks and manages your tasks and to do lists, it actually does the triage and makes the decisions for you!

Hmmm……helpful apps, niche market, address book, SMS, swiss, email harvesting, faith converter, theological plagiarism, religious texts, productivity, projects, to do list, actions, GTD, weird software, mail.app, apple mail

Tags: actions, Address Book, Apple Mail, email harvesting, faith converter, gtd, helpful apps, mail.app, niche market, Productivity, projects, religious texts, SMS, swiss, theological plagiarism, to do list, weird software