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Yes my first thought was great another we'll mine your data for a trivial benefit that you can mostly get from Tunderbird or other desktop clients. E-mail is a

Yes my first thought was great another we'll mine your data for a trivial benefit that you can mostly get from Tunderbird or other desktop clients. E-mail is a utility to be provided by non-ad tech company and browsed using an open source/private desktop client... that you pay a monthly fee for. At $30 / month for a webclient I would hope it comes with full iron-clad private hosting of your stuff with an strong privacy-based agreement to boot. I pay half that for my mail for a few mailboxes about maybe 50 gbs of storage between them.

smacktoward 7y ago
In fairness, I love and rely on Thunderbird, but I certainly wouldn't call it a triumph of usability. The UI hasn't changed appreciably in more than a decade, and it wasn't particularly easy or pleasant to use even back then. Don't get me wrong, it works well for what it sets out to do, and the stagnation is understandable given how Thunderbird was always treated by Mozilla as a sort of red-headed stepchild before they cut it loose altogether. This is a project that has been operating in survival mode for a long time now. But it does mean that there is space in the market for an email client with a modern UI and some fresh ideas on how to interact with email.
jschwartzi 7y ago
Information hiding is key. I get bombarded by so many trash emails every day that I could spend weeks unsubscribing to stuff. When Gmail came out with their tabbed interface and hid all the marketing messages behind a tab, I started using email again for the first time in about 7 years. Before that it was actually less useful than postal mail because I couldn't find anything for the flood of crap. That's something Outlook and Thunderbird don't do, is give you convenient features to hide information. Sure, you can organize things into folders or labels, colorize things for follow-up, sort emails, etc., but you're fundamentally limited by their model of "emails should be in a list, like a database. And they should be in chronological order. And you deal with them in chronological order, or you colorize them."
- kthejoker2 7y ago
  Outlook has added a lot of "smart" features to its inbox sorting and management. I'll just say "so far so good" but clearly there's something in the air in the space.

smacktoward 7y ago

In fairness, I love and rely on Thunderbird, but I certainly wouldn't call it a triumph of usability. The UI hasn't changed appreciably in more than a decade, and it wasn't particularly easy or pleasant to use even back then. Don't get me wrong, it works well for what it sets out to do, and the stagnation is understandable given how Thunderbird was always treated by Mozilla as a sort of red-headed stepchild before they cut it loose altogether. This is a project that has been operating in survival mode for a long time now. But it does mean that there is space in the market for an email client with a modern UI and some fresh ideas on how to interact with email.

jschwartzi 7y ago

Information hiding is key. I get bombarded by so many trash emails every day that I could spend weeks unsubscribing to stuff. When Gmail came out with their tabbed interface and hid all the marketing messages behind a tab, I started using email again for the first time in about 7 years. Before that it was actually less useful than postal mail because I couldn't find anything for the flood of crap. That's something Outlook and Thunderbird don't do, is give you convenient features to hide information. Sure, you can organize things into folders or labels, colorize things for follow-up, sort emails, etc., but you're fundamentally limited by their model of "emails should be in a list, like a database. And they should be in chronological order. And you deal with them in chronological order, or you colorize them."

kthejoker2 7y ago
Outlook has added a lot of "smart" features to its inbox sorting and management. I'll just say "so far so good" but clearly there's something in the air in the space.