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Ask HN: What are you missing in existing email clients?

• sbinthree 9y ago
  I want webmail that is ruthlessly simple. I don't care about: flags, importance, message status, categories, conversations, etc. Just show me the sender, subject line and date and when I click it, the message. I wish there was more/better scripting / automation tools (ie. if contains "unsubscribe" then archive). Basically I want Gmail but faster load time and better "rules".
  • rasmusei 9y ago
    Would you consider a desktop client if it gave you that? I also want simplicity, but synced to my hard drive.
  • kbenson 9y ago
    That sounds like most the old webmail clients of yesteryear, except for speed. Squirrelmail was pretty bare bones, but worked. Beating Gmail for speed is going to be hard unless you work with some non-traditional backing storage. If you really, really want speed, simplicity (beyond initial learning curve at least) and access, getting access to a host that allows shell access, has mutt and screen or tmux installed, and accepts mail delivery would hit all your points as long as a SSH session is doable. Screen/tmux keep the client open when you are disconnected to speed (no need to scan a few hundred MB or couple GB of messages in mbox or Maildir format), and mutt will be as fast and configurable as you can imagine (plus you generally get procmail). If you're actually interested in that and don't want to run your own mail server, sonic.com (used to be sonic.net) has free shell accounts for customers, and they have non internet services you can sign up for still I think (such as hosting). In any case, you can just call or email support and tell them you are looking for a shell account to read your email and they might hook you up with a shell account for a couple bucks a month.
• Nadya 9y ago
  Folders that display their subfolders content. This problem is very inherently noticeable in Outlook while at work. There are 5 types of problems sent to 1 team distro. I filter these 5 types of problems, based on the Subject field, to a different subfolder of the team distro folder. When I view the team distro folder - I don't see any email. I need to click into the individual subfolders. If I create a Search Folder (which will let me see all search results from these 5 folders, effectively being what I want) it needs to be a Top Level folder and cannot, itself, be a Subfolder or reorganized. It will live under the Search Folders menu effectively thwarting my attempts at organization. I would like to only be notified of new email that enters specific folders - rather than just an on/off where I am spammed with dozens if not hundreds of desktop notifications I do not care for. This way I don't need to keep my email always-visible to see when I get important email. I would like extremely flexible organizational rules, again similar to Outlook. All in a UI that gets out of my way and works well in portrait mode, as the few emails I get tend to be more longform and I like to reduce scrolling. I actually like Mailbird's [0] UI because I prefer icons over text labels for a tool I'm using frequently. Terrible UX (what do all these icons mean?) is something I'm willing to overcome as a power user. Using email/webmail clients reminds me of using IE6 with several toolbars installed to the point where I see more of IE's UI than I do the webpage I'm trying to browse. When I read emails I feel like I see more email client than I do email and that's aggravating. [0] https://www.getmailbird.com https://www.getmailbird.com
  • rasmusei 9y ago
    Thanks for the detailed reply. I sort of understand the design decision in Outlook to make the search folders a separate (and flat?) tree. What behavior would you expect from operations like copy, search if you put a search folder inside another (physical) folder? Anyway, I'm sure there are sensible ways to do what you're asking for, but it opens up questions about what a "folder" is and should be. Very interesting. Notification settings agreed! I always turned all of the notifications off when I had Outlook. Portrait mode, OK. Many email clients do give some few options for various horizontal/vertical splits. Are the options in Outlook enough in that respect?
    • 9y ago
• laumars 9y ago
  I really hate Electron in general but I've really found an affinity for Mailspring. So much so that I'd actually go as far as saying it's the only email client I've genuinely liked (rather than tolerated). So highly recommend it in spite of the larger footprint it carries compared to fully native. As an aside note, it supports Gmail and other proprietary cloud mailboxes - if just due to its being Electron based - so theres no more messing about with IMAP et al for Gmail
• cimmanom 9y ago
  I've used Apple's mail.app for over a decade now and don't think anything else matches its handling of multiple accounts (all the other clients I've tried try to keep the accounts too separate). For reference, I've got 8 active accounts at the moment. Unfortunately, it's increasingly buggy in increasingly problematic ways, and Apple appears to have zero interest in fixing it. So I'd love to see a client that works like that for multiple accounts (with support for both POP and IMAP) and has all of Apple Mail's features but isn't broken. The other things I want, but that wouldn't be enough on its own to get me to switch, would be: 1) a way to apply multiple tags to a single message, and filter by tag 2) add private notes to a message or thread