14 ms·

Re-Designing the classic email client

284 points by agos 14y ago

ollysb 14y ago
I like the idea of creating actions from within your email client. Integration with some project management tools like pivotal or trello would really smooth off this part of my workflow.
- Zash 14y ago
  Both Evolution and Thunderbird with the Lightning plugin has right-click → convert to task. Lots of room for improvement, but it works.
  - drunkenfly 14y ago
    Even Outlook has it. Right click, Follow up to create a task; right click, Categorize - to assign category. Out of the box, no plugins required.
- chmike 14y ago
  It looks like a different functionality than mail. It is risky to try solving different problems with the same tool. Though the tasks are abviously connecetd.
jasonhitchcock 14y ago
You just cloned Sparrow and called it a "re-design." http://sparrowmailapp.com/ http://sparrowmailapp.com/
apricot13 14y ago
at the risk of sounding like a broken record, when I read the 'actionsteps' section I immediately thought of TSW. http://www.thesecretweapon.org/ http://www.thesecretweapon.org/ the idea behind it is is that we don't rely on the inbox for our todo list - which is what we all tend to do! because, email isn't designed as a todo list and neither are any email clients I've used :P
ben0x539 14y ago
holy shit just write your web pages in html, not everything needs to be a crazy javascript abomination where the body text fades in slowly
- Flimm 14y ago
  Having the web page fade in slowly gives the impression of speed. It's not just a fancy gimmick.
  - inetsee 14y ago
    I ran a website speed test on this page; it performed very poorly (load time more than 14 seconds). Personally, I'd rather see websites with real speed, rather than something pretty that just has the impression of speed. In my opinion, having a web page fade in is just a gimmick.
    - bmelton 14y ago
      In all fairness, running a speed test against a site that is currently on the front page of HN is a little bit of a stacked deck, isn't it?
      - hapless 14y ago
        Isn't that when it matters the most?
        bmelton 14y ago
        Perhaps, but that completely misses the point. The HN effect completely crashes lots of servers. It's not at all unlikely that the page appears snappy most of the time and is simply so ill-performant at the moment because it was being hammered. Not saying that's true or false, mind you; Just that when something is on the front page of HN is perhaps the least likely time to gather a representative benchmark.
    - mnutt 14y ago
saint-loup 14y ago
The layout of the page (or lack thereof) makes it hard to know what portion you must focus on. The flow is really messy.
- mnicole 14y ago
  This was my hangup. My eye was going towards all of the heavy red and black shapes and not the screenshots themselves.
  - alan_cx 14y ago
    Phew, thought I was the only one. Like I was getting old or something.
hapless 14y ago
This guy has teeny tiny letters hardcoded into JPGs on his web site. I can't read it. Fortunately, this means I can disregard what he has to say about UI/UX. Sometimes the medium IS the message.
- manmal 14y ago
  Looks really bad on my retina Macbook pro, all pixelated. If he's to do that JPG stuff, he ought to include x2 images :)
  - untog 14y ago
    The retina Macbook is going to be in a small minority for a while yet- don't expect people to be leaping out of their seats to accomodate you!
    - tammer 14y ago
      Catering to these users now will preserve the design for the next round of display technology. We all know the future belongs to these types of displays.
      - untog 14y ago
        Sure, in a perfect world when you have no other pressing issues to attend to. If you do, making @2x versions of every image on your site is going to slide down the scale of necessity.
    - manmal 14y ago
      Have you looked at the Windows 8 tablet resolutions yet? > 1080 will be the new defacto standard.
  - darkstalker 14y ago
    If the apps could use the real pixels instead of a "retina 2x" mode, there wouldnt be any problems. Those things are apple-specific implementation details (badly designed imho).
pbnjay 14y ago
I love this concept. I'm curious how well this would work for multiple projects, a blend of personal and work email, and high-volume inboxes. Seems like it'd really need some type of labeling in addition to the actionsteps. Hopefully I get some free time this week, I might look into building some of this. Looks like fun.
- peterkchen 14y ago
  Labeling would definitely be a key feature set especially if it's heavily integrating with email service providers like gmail. What were you thinking of building it in? I've been working on something similar in the past year and I'm considering bringing it back.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
huhtenberg 14y ago
The problem is that this approach helps his workflow and it does absolutely nothing for mine. I understand what he describes, I just can't relate to it.
mcdillon 14y ago
So have you heard of www.mail-pilot.com?
brianlovin 14y ago
Is there anything out there right now that handles email attachments like described in this pitch? I would love the ability to see all the attachments ever sent to me, organized by date/sender/filetype. Or clicking on a contact and seeing all attachments I've shared with that person.
- drunkenfly 14y ago
  Xobni for Outlook does it. https://www.xobni.com/ https://www.xobni.com/
- joch 14y ago
  Postbox does that to some extent. See screenshots: http://postbox-inc.com/graphics/screenshots http://postbox-inc.com/graphics/screenshots
- zio99 14y ago
  Like drunkenfly mentioned, there's the Smartr Contacts app, and Rapportive as well for contact management: http://rapportive.com/ http://rapportive.com/
- jorangreef 14y ago
  Brian, am working on something like that, please leave your email address at https://ronomon.com https://ronomon.com to be notified when ready.
- antninja 14y ago
  I used Zenbe's webmail when it was free and it did just this. Now their site is off and I've learned they have been acquired by Facebook in 2010.
- davegauer 14y ago
  The mail client built into the Opera browser has an Attachments filter which allows you to see all messages by attachment type. After that, you can sort the messages by 'From', 'Subject', 'Size', etc. No thumbnails as in his example, though. As with everything in the Opera mail client, it is all handled through two panes - filtering on the left (Unread, Received, Labels, Attachments, etc.) and the email messages themselves on the right. All email accounts are aggregated together. I've been hugely enamored with its simplicity and elegance for years.
ScottWhigham 14y ago
MS Outlook has had something along these lines for years - they call it something else ("Quick Click" or something) but it allows you at least one-click colorization + task creation. It's not quite like he lays out but it's the basic idea of his "Actionsteps". I don't use it, and I would consider myself an Outlook power user. I have learned techniques that, quite frankly, just work better for me.
- Splines 14y ago
  I use Outlook every day too, but don't really bother with the task tools that are built into it (even if it might (might!) integrate better with my email). It's too general-purpose. It's like giving me a full toolbox, and the only limit is my mind! I'd rather have a tool that is more purpose-built to handle my needs. These days I track todo-s in Trello and make sure my Inbox unread count stays at 0. That's it. The only thing I'm missing is better attachment management, but that's just a nice-to-have. It's not a problem I personally run into very often. I could imagine though if your workflow involved lots of attachments it could be frustrating that they're treated as second-class citizens.
  - ScottWhigham 14y ago
    I use the heck out of the appts and tasks - appts are "things that I have to physical participate in" (phone call, lunch) and tasks are "reminders". I would not survive long without those. I use Trello but only to manage a small team of tasks. You said, "The only thing I'm missing is better attachment management" - to me, the worst part about Outlook is the search functionality. It's just awful IMO. I can deal with the crappy attachment handling/saving/etc but when it takes a week for the "Instant Search" thing to index my 2gb Outlook file, I get pissed haha
tuananh 14y ago
LOL, this looks identical to Sparrow!
- johnernaut 14y ago
  My exact thoughts when I first saw his screenshots.
blakeburch 14y ago
There are chrome extensions that solve these functional issues. ActiveInbox and Attachments.me UI/UX is still up in the air.
skylamer 14y ago
cufon+a lot of jquery and look what happens...
joch 14y ago
If you are into GTD, an email workflow for handling email could be much more flexible. Example when going through your inbox: 1. Respond to/do anything that can be done in two minutes and archive the email. (It helps if you are maintaining your inbox at zero.) 2. If it takes longer than a few minutes to do, send it off to your GTD app for processing as an action step, waiting for or something else, and archive the email.
obilgic 14y ago
to much text for a "disruptive" idea
rdl 14y ago
I comfortably ignore any comments about email and what it should be from anyone who hasn't used a text email client (well configured) like mutt, mh, elm, or an emacs mode for at least 100 hours. The only real complaints I have about email with a well-configured text client are: * HTML mail from idiots * Syncing on multiple machines, with offline mode (IMAP is ok, but you want to keep full repositories on laptops for use without network, and ideally to process email more quickly than network access) * Mobile clients -- Android has K9Mail, haven't found anything great on iOS yet. The keyboard-based mail workflow doesn't translate to the tablet/phone form factor, but triggers do even more so, so there should be something there * Handling attachments well * Global directory across organizations (FB/LinkedIn/etc. integration could help a lot) * Multi-user mailboxes; you need some kind of ticketing/tagging/CRM on top of it, and these are all standalone, sometimes web based, and fairly universally suck. There are ways to tie them into plain email though.
- glodime 14y ago
  I just learned about imapsync, imapcopy, OfflineIMAP and Archivemail on linux. I haven't test them out yet. Have you tried any of these utilities? They seem to address the "Syncing on multiple machines" bit of your post.
  - rdl 14y ago
    I use mbsync (http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html) and mutt. The thing I hate is that Mutt's native OfflineIMAP support is broken, forcing me to use an external maildir syncer, but other than that, it works great. I still haven't set up search.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  If I can expand on your "HTML mail from idiots" -- HTML mail from non-idiots is pretty much a non-issue. A textual document with minimal markup renders well in a standard console email client. It's when an idiot sends you a highly-formatted email which is all-but-unreadable as straight text, that you've got issues. I'll add: the same highly-formatted emails are very likely to break horribly on handheld devices as well, which are pretty much limited to presenting a small amount of information with minimal formatting -- normal, italic, bold, and possibly some colored text. And dittos on K9Mail. For IMAP: offlineimap seems to be a good solution (though not so much on mobile). Directories: really should be a solved problem by now. I still find myself generally maintaining my own .mail-aliases list though.
podperson 14y ago
Don't fix email. Fix communication. Why, on my iPhone, do I have: 1. An email app (which required a major update to unite mail boxes) 2. A "messages" app (which abstracts out two different message systems) 3. A phone app 4. A contacts app 5. Twitter 6. Facebook 7. Skype What I want to do is (a) send messages to people (I don't care how), (b) check messages I've received (from anyone, using any method), (c) manage my messages (both incoming and outgoing), and -- as the writer of the article points out -- (d) manage my attachments. On the iPhone (which is by no means the worst case) I might end up doing something stupid like looking up a contact, phone them, get sent to voicemail. Go back to the contact. Use a slightly different path to send an SMS. Discover it doesn't get sent. Switch to mail, and send a message. Meanwhile the recipient gets a missed call, an empty voicemail, eventually gets the SMS, and then receives an email -- in three different apps on their iPhone. Tiny incremental improvements to email will only nibble at the edges of the larger problem. Let me communicate with a unified UI and unified contacts.
- ineedtosleep 14y ago
  > Tiny incremental improvements to email will only nibble at the edges of the larger problem. Let me communicate with a unified UI and unified contacts. Isn't that Google's main intent with integrating Google Voice onto phones? The recipient use case seems to work well under the Google apps where Google Voice shows your SMS and voicemails, a quick click would bring you to Gmail. The only issue I see here, is that I that I don't believe there is a cross-app indicator of new email (excluding extensions and external apps).
  - simantel 14y ago
    I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "a cross-app indicator of new email," but you can actually have voicemails and SMS forwarded to your email from Google Voice, creating a sort of "universal inbox."
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- jyou 14y ago
ethanbird 14y ago
Looking through the article, I found most of the changes to be superficial, other than 'actionsteps,' which I'm not convinced will solve any problem. Instead of trying to stop mail from becoming a separate to-do list, actionsteps encourages you to keep some to-dos in your mail client and the rest outside of your mail client in a third party app. Also, I tried the social thing with emails, and what it looks great in theory. However, I really don't get a lot of emails from people I'm friends with on Facebook or follow on Twitter.
nicholassmith 14y ago
I've been through mail clients for a while now, and I've even written one. The thing I realised is, even when it does exactly what I want I'm still burdened by the fact that for my needs email sucks, so I've managed to move a lot of work stuff to things like Asana for project management, and the email side of it is pretty much for junk and occasional correspondence.
moeffju 14y ago
Sparrow is so close to this. All it's lacking is the all-attachments view and the prioritizing, but you can hack the prioritizing easily enough with Gmail labels. Even then, I don't think that's enough, though. I think e-mail nowadays needs to be more of a TODO manager and less about messaging.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- calinet6 14y ago
  Agreed, 100%. I saw the screenshot and thought, "Oh, it's Sparrow with some red colors and a new little organization feature. Neat." Sparrow is literally this exact client design, minus the cute "Actionsteps" or whatever. They could easily add some more color coding to Sparrow and it would fill this need pretty easily (well, that and fix some annoyances, which as is usually the case, is the larger usability problem—simply not being annoying). More importantly, you're right: e-mail is no longer just communication. Our e-mail clients are how we organize incoming tasks and work. This is why GTD and the like focus so strongly on e-mail, because it's become our primary means of incoming information. Organizing that is the problem, and it does need a solution.
- mrwidget 14y ago
  This is so close to Sparrow because it completely rips-off the Sparrow's design. Take a look at the compose new mail window, it's the same except the send button is red (and I think the bcc line has moved up). The toolbar icons and order of the icons are identical to Sparrow. All sorts of other little things that could be different too are not, like the select state of the current email. It would be ok if he, at least, mentioned that it was based on Sparrow. There's one or two original things in the design, for example, he put his url in the left corner though.
the_gipsy 14y ago
Uh, let me see. Attempt nº 5712 to revolutionize the way we use email. Tell me more. "Mark as read" is useless? I thought nowaday we had "archive", "search" and such from gmail... no mention of that. OK then, let's see what you offer... "Clutter-free interface", "clean typography" and the mystery option "what you really need"? Are you (f) kidding me? This can't scream "I'm thunderbird but made by graphical designers" any louder. Oooh Actionsteps! I have NO idea what you are, but you must be "what I really need"! Scroll, scroll, still no idea... Aha! I have Favourites (why didn't I come up with that?), and Actionsteps, which "organize" my stuff. So like, categories, but with a mysterious name. And, it can handle attachments! What year is this? Plus facebook etc integration like that's something I'd ever not want to disable. Attempt nº 5712 archieved.
- dclowd9901 14y ago
  I still maintain we should ignore the "problem" with email and instead focus on making it easier just to share stuff. As it stands, it's always a crap shoot when I send a file to someone as to whether or not they'll actually be able to read it.
- twodayslate 14y ago
  Agreed. I can basically get everything he wants in gmail with a few extensions/labs enabled.
corywatilo 14y ago
Postbox does everything he mentioned, and has for quite some time. It might behoove this guy to do some due diligence in the space, or maybe take time to explain how his designs are better than current apps. Also, while his designs look "nice", they are over-designed and would start looking stale very quickly. When you're building a product that is used on a daily basis, less "design" is more. But I'm sure as a result of this post, he'll find some clients and make some money from it, so good for him.
ezy 14y ago
This person needs to try outlook. You see, there's a little flag you can click on next to the email with a task priority. And a todo bar/list which shows them in priority order. Not only has it existed before, but it really doesn't help that much. You still need to apply yourself to use it correctly. This doesn't change that. Sigh... but then I knew I was in for wheel re-invention as soon as I saw the "modern creative workflow" sales bullshit. Perhaps there's something to be gained by making it prettier than outlook, I dunno. I feel like Alan Kay -- read about your history folks. If you're going to "re-invent email" you might want to, I don't know -- try out many different existing email clients?
- hythloday 14y ago
  I had a serious crack at using Outlook for this a few years ago and I found it woefully inadequate. Outlook tasks are either todo or done. There's no way of monitoring "waiting on Alice for confirmation", "waiting for Bob's approval of the finished work". Related to this, the task list seems to only display one-dimensionally, e.g. I couldn't put together a useful list of my more important tasks that were due later this week alongside my less-important tasks due today. Also, tasks are effectively a pointer to an email. There's no way of tying together disparate emails into a single task. Lastly, I found myself wanting to really use tasks as a something like "tag annotations" - I'd be having 2 or 3 conversations about optimization in the team and want to note them all together along with a high-level view of things to do before and after. I quite like Outlook and would love its task system to be more useful, enough so that I've thought of putting work into it to make it what I want. The fact is, though, that it doesn't really do most of what the author of the article wants, and it definitely isn't suitable as anything more than building blocks for a workflow system.
- pault 14y ago
  To be fair, as far as I can tell this is only a concept by a UI designer, created as a portfolio piece. I believe the its purpose isn't to reinvent email as much as it is to show off his knowledge of graphic design and CSS transforms.
- Too 14y ago
  I've also tried outlooks tasks and while it's good as one-off reminders it doesn't solve the big problem with email, and neither will this mockup that doesn't even propose anything else than the action-lists. The problem with email is that all information you need is everywhere! It's a matter of discipline. Labels only solve half the issue. To start with we've got improper headlines, emails with information about many, totally unrelated tasks, replies to old messages in same conversation - this breaks threading in every email client i've tried, especially if many different senders jump in and out of the conversation.
SeoxyS 14y ago
As a designer, the OP should know better than to design webpages as a giant <img> tag... It's unreadable on my Retina MBP.
porker 14y ago
Immediate thoughts: From a business perspective, 3 steps like that isn't enough. What I really want is email completely integrated with a CRM/Project management tool & a calendar - I have tried Googl Apps and the whole Email / Tasks / Calendar separation just doesn't work. From what I've seen Exchange comes close, and I believe one of the others (Zimbra?) does too. The problem with email is everyone uses it differently. The email client that works for my work emails won't work for my personal email account and vice versa. Minimalist for GMail is nice, it starts to improve by removing clutter: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfddepdpdafhhepdbek https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfdde... and I wouldn't be without it. I totally agree about typography - it would make a massive difference. But not just here, everywhere. Grouping email is another problem - I've tried folders (one per email, not enough), tags/labels (unmanageable). This is symtomatic of our whole digital information management issue - how do we deal with so much flexible information? Hence my need for a CRM/tasks/todo app on top of email. [Background: I run a small company, it's growing, and managing projects/developers/clients/email is a headache. If you've found a way to reduce the pain, say!]
- jorangreef 14y ago
  Am working on this. Please leave your email at https://ronomon.com https://ronomon.com and I will let you know when it's ready.
jetz 14y ago
Email nor anything related to core email protocols do not need to be fixed or redesigned. It's doing what it was supposed to be used for and still doing it very well. Over the years desktop and web mail people have added too much and its 70s design idea of anyone can send mail to any other's inbox (btw, creative idea at the time worked till 2000s) have cooperatively decreased its usage. We still need this universal and mature protocol but we should do a different thing for communication. period.
jph 14y ago
Mail-Pilot is awesome for email as an inbox. Take a look at Mail-Pilot.com and how it has read later, tasks, connections to people, and more. Disclosure that I'm one of their backers.
herbig 14y ago
Typo: http://www.vanschneider.com/wp-content/themes/vanschneider/images/about_header.png http://www.vanschneider.com/wp-content/themes/vanschneider/i...
ereckers 14y ago
The take away here should be, if you're going to spend time redesigning email clients, you should take an equal or greater amount of time laying it out on your website. So much for sharing ideas. When half the comments trash your WordPress template before they even get to the subject, you know it's a tough crowd.
eschulte 14y ago
GNUS already supports all of the features proposed by this article (including personalized pictures) and it has been around since the early 90s. edit: s/early 90s/late 80s/
mariusmg 14y ago
Horrible site. The text is served as jpg image. This guy can't get the basics right but it's designing "experiences"....
rubergly 14y ago
Looking at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1072027/Screenshots/1z.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1072027/Screenshots/1z.png, I find the comment about "perfect spacing and clean typography" almost laughable. I also prefer design that incorporates smart typography to convey importance and structure. His app mockups seem to show an understanding of this, but the site layout in general (especially this section) does not. (1) why is the "We spend a huge amount of our day..." text in red? (2) why is that text smaller than the previous chunk of text? (3) why is that entire previous chunk of text italicized? (4) how is "Mark as read is useless..." at all related to "Emails aren't just emails anymore"? why are these in the same paragraph? "Mark as read" seems like it should be the beginning of a list of complaints about email, not the supporting sentence for "Emails aren't just emails anymore" -- this just comes off as extremely bad flow of thought, and the typography makes it more confusing. (5) why is the heading for each of the boxes split into all-caps tiny text and no-caps large text? the idea in itself isn't terrible, but the tiny text is too tiny, and the splitting into tiny and large text isn't consistent -- clearly it's meant so that the large text can be read on its own and the tiny text adds to the experience upon closer inspection, and so putting the "and" at the end of the "A clean and" tiny text for the first box makes sense, but then why is the "and" at the beginning of the "and clean typograhpy" large text in the second box?
myoffe 14y ago
Leave email alone. It's doing it's job 95% alright. Just use a reasonable client (e.g. http://mail.google.com http://mail.google.com, Sparrow) and there is really almost nothing to complain about. The problem is that we are using email for everything. Since Facebook, people rarely send pictures to each other anymore. Since Blogging, people rarely send long personal stories to 100 friends. Etc', etc... Slowly and carefully we find the right alternatives to the default, which is email. If you need task management, use Asana or something. It's really good, and it integrates with email quite well. Also, Trello is excellent as a flexible Kanban board. It's all about finding and using (rigorously) the right tool. Don't force everything you need in computing into email, and you won't have to reinvent email. I really doubt email will change at all. Maybe it will die, or be less common. But it will not change. It's so simple, why change it anyway?
backspace 14y ago
Wow, haven't read such a vaporware article in awhile. The author promises a "I'm going to change 30+ years of email UI/UX" and instead proposes 4 different labels and a workflow that works for him. Yup, you revolutionalized email alright.
vlokshin 14y ago
At first I was going to commend the author on being a UI/UX reincarnation of Dieter Rams (I know he isn't dead yet, so that's not quite logical). Then I realize the entire page was all images. Why???
runjake 14y ago
Nevermind classic email clients, let's begin with the method the author used to make his point. It's a verbose mish-mash of disjointed text flow and pseudo-infographics. It does not flow well at all. From what I can tell, you can achieve his vision of an email client by changing preferences in Mountain Lion's Mail.app client, so his vision is here today (well, soon).
patrickmay 14y ago
I'm not going to take design advice from a website that thinks it knows better than I do how wide my browser window should be.
christiangenco 14y ago
Please, please, please - for the love of all that is good and grammatical - change "noone" to "no one" as quickly as you can possibly photoshop in mail2.jpeg. This single error tainted your argument (for me, at least) for the rest of the page.
sramsay 14y ago
I take the point about clutter and typography, but the best email client I have ever used is nmh <http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/> http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/>, largely because I was able to hack together this kind of work flow effortlessly. I'm always marveling at how modern clients lack the capabilities I have in a piece of software that has changed little since the RAND Corporation put it together decades ago.
ricardobeat 14y ago
Title should be Redesigning Sparrow :) The design is clearly inspired in Sparrow, which already does the facebook pictures thing, nice typography and all. It's only missing the "action levels" (you can only mark as favorite/important).
alexwolfe 14y ago
I think it's an interesting UI design and concept and has some strong visual appeal to it. I realize a lot of the concepts in this design have been tried before in one way or another. However, just as important as the design is seeing how if actually feels. I think it certainly looks good in photoshop but the trick is executing in a way that makes it feel "right" too. Any plans for development?
RobMcCullough 14y ago
Slightly unrelated but your portfolio webpage is absolutely gorgeous!
JBiserkov 14y ago
Microsoft (Outlook+Exchange+Lync (formerly Office Communicator))
twelvechairs 14y ago
I feel sorry for the author here. Its very easy to criticise and hard to create. There are a lot of people here trying to tear him down. If you know better - stop sitting around on Hackernews and go make it. If not, then stop whining when someone is trying to do something constructive - or at the very least provide some points you think he can fix and be nice about it, not like a petulant 12-year old...
PaulHoule 14y ago
Many of the facile assumptions designers make about email are wrong. The sanebox service, for instance, has the same wrong assumption -- that the problem is spam and unimportant emails. The toughest problem I have in email management is important emails that are difficult to answer. For instance, before I took off for San Diego this week, I had to answer an email that required a prompt reply. This email involved an important relationship for which the circumstances had radically changed -- I wasn't sure what I wanted out of the situation or what I could do for the other party. Given an email like that, my natural temptation is to put off dealing with them, so I have a plug of "important and somewhat urgent" messages sitting in my box at any time. Spam and other unimportant messages, on the other hand, can be deleted in seconds, and pose very little cognitive load. If there's any real cost of dealing with spam it's that I have an itchy trigger finger and occasionally delete an email that I shouldn't.
bradgessler 14y ago
This looks almost identical to Sparrow with the exception that Sparrow simply uses a star as an action item.
gcr 14y ago
Is anyone else seriously disturbed by the layout? The whole page is a big giant JPEG full of unscalable, unsearchable text. Google doesn't read .JPEGs. Kiss your SEO goodbye. I can't zoom into a page like this. When I do, it's pixelated and you've somehow managed to screw up the horizontal scrollbar so I can't even read the text on the left and right sides. This also makes the site completely unbearable under any screen resolution smaller than 1280x1024.
beilabs 14y ago
Just going to pimp a startup working out of Sydney called ZeroMail. zeromail.com is a real product looking to shake up the traditional email client. Best of luck to them!
krollew 14y ago
Yeah. So why you didn't earned bilions of dolars on new, great e-mail clients? Maybe it's not what people needs, huh?
alan_cx 14y ago
Dont know about any one else, but I couldn't close the window fast enough after the page loaded. It just assaulted my brain. I have no idea why. It literally repelled me. Quite strange.
gasuns 14y ago
Like PostBox only online.
RyanMcGreal 14y ago
Forgive me if I'm missing something, but I already have this with my Thunderbird email client, which allows me to assign tags with customizable names and colours and to sort my emails into an arbitrary set of folders.
tshadwell 14y ago
Have you taken a look at the code? It's disgusting, seriously.

284 points by agos 14y ago

I like the idea of creating actions from within your email client. Integration with some project management tools like pivotal or trello would really smooth off this part of my workflow.

Zash 14y ago
Both Evolution and Thunderbird with the Lightning plugin has right-click → convert to task. Lots of room for improvement, but it works.
- drunkenfly 14y ago
  Even Outlook has it. Right click, Follow up to create a task; right click, Categorize - to assign category. Out of the box, no plugins required.
chmike 14y ago
It looks like a different functionality than mail. It is risky to try solving different problems with the same tool. Though the tasks are abviously connecetd.

jasonhitchcock 14y ago

You just cloned Sparrow and called it a "re-design." http://sparrowmailapp.com/ http://sparrowmailapp.com/

apricot13 14y ago

at the risk of sounding like a broken record, when I read the 'actionsteps' section I immediately thought of TSW. http://www.thesecretweapon.org/ http://www.thesecretweapon.org/ the idea behind it is is that we don't rely on the inbox for our todo list - which is what we all tend to do! because, email isn't designed as a todo list and neither are any email clients I've used :P

ben0x539 14y ago

holy shit just write your web pages in html, not everything needs to be a crazy javascript abomination where the body text fades in slowly

Flimm 14y ago
Having the web page fade in slowly gives the impression of speed. It's not just a fancy gimmick.
- inetsee 14y ago
  I ran a website speed test on this page; it performed very poorly (load time more than 14 seconds). Personally, I'd rather see websites with real speed, rather than something pretty that just has the impression of speed. In my opinion, having a web page fade in is just a gimmick.
  - bmelton 14y ago
    In all fairness, running a speed test against a site that is currently on the front page of HN is a little bit of a stacked deck, isn't it?
    - hapless 14y ago
      Isn't that when it matters the most?
      - bmelton 14y ago
        Perhaps, but that completely misses the point. The HN effect completely crashes lots of servers. It's not at all unlikely that the page appears snappy most of the time and is simply so ill-performant at the moment because it was being hammered. Not saying that's true or false, mind you; Just that when something is on the front page of HN is perhaps the least likely time to gather a representative benchmark.
  - mnutt 14y ago

saint-loup 14y ago

The layout of the page (or lack thereof) makes it hard to know what portion you must focus on. The flow is really messy.

mnicole 14y ago
This was my hangup. My eye was going towards all of the heavy red and black shapes and not the screenshots themselves.
- alan_cx 14y ago
  Phew, thought I was the only one. Like I was getting old or something.

hapless 14y ago

This guy has teeny tiny letters hardcoded into JPGs on his web site. I can't read it. Fortunately, this means I can disregard what he has to say about UI/UX. Sometimes the medium IS the message.

manmal 14y ago
Looks really bad on my retina Macbook pro, all pixelated. If he's to do that JPG stuff, he ought to include x2 images :)
- untog 14y ago
  The retina Macbook is going to be in a small minority for a while yet- don't expect people to be leaping out of their seats to accomodate you!
  - tammer 14y ago
    Catering to these users now will preserve the design for the next round of display technology. We all know the future belongs to these types of displays.
    - untog 14y ago
      Sure, in a perfect world when you have no other pressing issues to attend to. If you do, making @2x versions of every image on your site is going to slide down the scale of necessity.
  - manmal 14y ago
    Have you looked at the Windows 8 tablet resolutions yet? > 1080 will be the new defacto standard.
- darkstalker 14y ago
  If the apps could use the real pixels instead of a "retina 2x" mode, there wouldnt be any problems. Those things are apple-specific implementation details (badly designed imho).

pbnjay 14y ago

I love this concept. I'm curious how well this would work for multiple projects, a blend of personal and work email, and high-volume inboxes. Seems like it'd really need some type of labeling in addition to the actionsteps. Hopefully I get some free time this week, I might look into building some of this. Looks like fun.

peterkchen 14y ago
Labeling would definitely be a key feature set especially if it's heavily integrating with email service providers like gmail. What were you thinking of building it in? I've been working on something similar in the past year and I'm considering bringing it back.

deleted 14y ago

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huhtenberg 14y ago

The problem is that this approach helps his workflow and it does absolutely nothing for mine. I understand what he describes, I just can't relate to it.

mcdillon 14y ago

So have you heard of www.mail-pilot.com?

brianlovin 14y ago

Is there anything out there right now that handles email attachments like described in this pitch? I would love the ability to see all the attachments ever sent to me, organized by date/sender/filetype. Or clicking on a contact and seeing all attachments I've shared with that person.

drunkenfly 14y ago
Xobni for Outlook does it. https://www.xobni.com/ https://www.xobni.com/
joch 14y ago
Postbox does that to some extent. See screenshots: http://postbox-inc.com/graphics/screenshots http://postbox-inc.com/graphics/screenshots
zio99 14y ago
Like drunkenfly mentioned, there's the Smartr Contacts app, and Rapportive as well for contact management: http://rapportive.com/ http://rapportive.com/
jorangreef 14y ago
Brian, am working on something like that, please leave your email address at https://ronomon.com https://ronomon.com to be notified when ready.
antninja 14y ago
I used Zenbe's webmail when it was free and it did just this. Now their site is off and I've learned they have been acquired by Facebook in 2010.
davegauer 14y ago
The mail client built into the Opera browser has an Attachments filter which allows you to see all messages by attachment type. After that, you can sort the messages by 'From', 'Subject', 'Size', etc. No thumbnails as in his example, though. As with everything in the Opera mail client, it is all handled through two panes - filtering on the left (Unread, Received, Labels, Attachments, etc.) and the email messages themselves on the right. All email accounts are aggregated together. I've been hugely enamored with its simplicity and elegance for years.

ScottWhigham 14y ago

MS Outlook has had something along these lines for years - they call it something else ("Quick Click" or something) but it allows you at least one-click colorization + task creation. It's not quite like he lays out but it's the basic idea of his "Actionsteps". I don't use it, and I would consider myself an Outlook power user. I have learned techniques that, quite frankly, just work better for me.

Splines 14y ago
I use Outlook every day too, but don't really bother with the task tools that are built into it (even if it might (might!) integrate better with my email). It's too general-purpose. It's like giving me a full toolbox, and the only limit is my mind! I'd rather have a tool that is more purpose-built to handle my needs. These days I track todo-s in Trello and make sure my Inbox unread count stays at 0. That's it. The only thing I'm missing is better attachment management, but that's just a nice-to-have. It's not a problem I personally run into very often. I could imagine though if your workflow involved lots of attachments it could be frustrating that they're treated as second-class citizens.
- ScottWhigham 14y ago
  I use the heck out of the appts and tasks - appts are "things that I have to physical participate in" (phone call, lunch) and tasks are "reminders". I would not survive long without those. I use Trello but only to manage a small team of tasks. You said, "The only thing I'm missing is better attachment management" - to me, the worst part about Outlook is the search functionality. It's just awful IMO. I can deal with the crappy attachment handling/saving/etc but when it takes a week for the "Instant Search" thing to index my 2gb Outlook file, I get pissed haha

tuananh 14y ago

LOL, this looks identical to Sparrow!

johnernaut 14y ago
My exact thoughts when I first saw his screenshots.

blakeburch 14y ago

There are chrome extensions that solve these functional issues. ActiveInbox and Attachments.me UI/UX is still up in the air.

skylamer 14y ago

cufon+a lot of jquery and look what happens...

joch 14y ago

If you are into GTD, an email workflow for handling email could be much more flexible. Example when going through your inbox: 1. Respond to/do anything that can be done in two minutes and archive the email. (It helps if you are maintaining your inbox at zero.) 2. If it takes longer than a few minutes to do, send it off to your GTD app for processing as an action step, waiting for or something else, and archive the email.

obilgic 14y ago

to much text for a "disruptive" idea

rdl 14y ago

I comfortably ignore any comments about email and what it should be from anyone who hasn't used a text email client (well configured) like mutt, mh, elm, or an emacs mode for at least 100 hours. The only real complaints I have about email with a well-configured text client are: * HTML mail from idiots * Syncing on multiple machines, with offline mode (IMAP is ok, but you want to keep full repositories on laptops for use without network, and ideally to process email more quickly than network access) * Mobile clients -- Android has K9Mail, haven't found anything great on iOS yet. The keyboard-based mail workflow doesn't translate to the tablet/phone form factor, but triggers do even more so, so there should be something there * Handling attachments well * Global directory across organizations (FB/LinkedIn/etc. integration could help a lot) * Multi-user mailboxes; you need some kind of ticketing/tagging/CRM on top of it, and these are all standalone, sometimes web based, and fairly universally suck. There are ways to tie them into plain email though.

glodime 14y ago
I just learned about imapsync, imapcopy, OfflineIMAP and Archivemail on linux. I haven't test them out yet. Have you tried any of these utilities? They seem to address the "Syncing on multiple machines" bit of your post.
- rdl 14y ago
  I use mbsync (http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html) and mutt. The thing I hate is that Mutt's native OfflineIMAP support is broken, forcing me to use an external maildir syncer, but other than that, it works great. I still haven't set up search.
dredmorbius 14y ago
If I can expand on your "HTML mail from idiots" -- HTML mail from non-idiots is pretty much a non-issue. A textual document with minimal markup renders well in a standard console email client. It's when an idiot sends you a highly-formatted email which is all-but-unreadable as straight text, that you've got issues. I'll add: the same highly-formatted emails are very likely to break horribly on handheld devices as well, which are pretty much limited to presenting a small amount of information with minimal formatting -- normal, italic, bold, and possibly some colored text. And dittos on K9Mail. For IMAP: offlineimap seems to be a good solution (though not so much on mobile). Directories: really should be a solved problem by now. I still find myself generally maintaining my own .mail-aliases list though.

podperson 14y ago

Don't fix email. Fix communication. Why, on my iPhone, do I have: 1. An email app (which required a major update to unite mail boxes) 2. A "messages" app (which abstracts out two different message systems) 3. A phone app 4. A contacts app 5. Twitter 6. Facebook 7. Skype What I want to do is (a) send messages to people (I don't care how), (b) check messages I've received (from anyone, using any method), (c) manage my messages (both incoming and outgoing), and -- as the writer of the article points out -- (d) manage my attachments. On the iPhone (which is by no means the worst case) I might end up doing something stupid like looking up a contact, phone them, get sent to voicemail. Go back to the contact. Use a slightly different path to send an SMS. Discover it doesn't get sent. Switch to mail, and send a message. Meanwhile the recipient gets a missed call, an empty voicemail, eventually gets the SMS, and then receives an email -- in three different apps on their iPhone. Tiny incremental improvements to email will only nibble at the edges of the larger problem. Let me communicate with a unified UI and unified contacts.

ineedtosleep 14y ago
> Tiny incremental improvements to email will only nibble at the edges of the larger problem. Let me communicate with a unified UI and unified contacts. Isn't that Google's main intent with integrating Google Voice onto phones? The recipient use case seems to work well under the Google apps where Google Voice shows your SMS and voicemails, a quick click would bring you to Gmail. The only issue I see here, is that I that I don't believe there is a cross-app indicator of new email (excluding extensions and external apps).
- simantel 14y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "a cross-app indicator of new email," but you can actually have voicemails and SMS forwarded to your email from Google Voice, creating a sort of "universal inbox."
deleted 14y ago
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jyou 14y ago

ethanbird 14y ago

Looking through the article, I found most of the changes to be superficial, other than 'actionsteps,' which I'm not convinced will solve any problem. Instead of trying to stop mail from becoming a separate to-do list, actionsteps encourages you to keep some to-dos in your mail client and the rest outside of your mail client in a third party app. Also, I tried the social thing with emails, and what it looks great in theory. However, I really don't get a lot of emails from people I'm friends with on Facebook or follow on Twitter.

nicholassmith 14y ago

I've been through mail clients for a while now, and I've even written one. The thing I realised is, even when it does exactly what I want I'm still burdened by the fact that for my needs email sucks, so I've managed to move a lot of work stuff to things like Asana for project management, and the email side of it is pretty much for junk and occasional correspondence.

moeffju 14y ago

Sparrow is so close to this. All it's lacking is the all-attachments view and the prioritizing, but you can hack the prioritizing easily enough with Gmail labels. Even then, I don't think that's enough, though. I think e-mail nowadays needs to be more of a TODO manager and less about messaging.

deleted 14y ago
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calinet6 14y ago
Agreed, 100%. I saw the screenshot and thought, "Oh, it's Sparrow with some red colors and a new little organization feature. Neat." Sparrow is literally this exact client design, minus the cute "Actionsteps" or whatever. They could easily add some more color coding to Sparrow and it would fill this need pretty easily (well, that and fix some annoyances, which as is usually the case, is the larger usability problem—simply not being annoying). More importantly, you're right: e-mail is no longer just communication. Our e-mail clients are how we organize incoming tasks and work. This is why GTD and the like focus so strongly on e-mail, because it's become our primary means of incoming information. Organizing that is the problem, and it does need a solution.
mrwidget 14y ago
This is so close to Sparrow because it completely rips-off the Sparrow's design. Take a look at the compose new mail window, it's the same except the send button is red (and I think the bcc line has moved up). The toolbar icons and order of the icons are identical to Sparrow. All sorts of other little things that could be different too are not, like the select state of the current email. It would be ok if he, at least, mentioned that it was based on Sparrow. There's one or two original things in the design, for example, he put his url in the left corner though.

the_gipsy 14y ago

Uh, let me see. Attempt nº 5712 to revolutionize the way we use email. Tell me more. "Mark as read" is useless? I thought nowaday we had "archive", "search" and such from gmail... no mention of that. OK then, let's see what you offer... "Clutter-free interface", "clean typography" and the mystery option "what you really need"? Are you (f) kidding me? This can't scream "I'm thunderbird but made by graphical designers" any louder. Oooh Actionsteps! I have NO idea what you are, but you must be "what I really need"! Scroll, scroll, still no idea... Aha! I have Favourites (why didn't I come up with that?), and Actionsteps, which "organize" my stuff. So like, categories, but with a mysterious name. And, it can handle attachments! What year is this? Plus facebook etc integration like that's something I'd ever not want to disable. Attempt nº 5712 archieved.

dclowd9901 14y ago
I still maintain we should ignore the "problem" with email and instead focus on making it easier just to share stuff. As it stands, it's always a crap shoot when I send a file to someone as to whether or not they'll actually be able to read it.
twodayslate 14y ago
Agreed. I can basically get everything he wants in gmail with a few extensions/labs enabled.

corywatilo 14y ago

Postbox does everything he mentioned, and has for quite some time. It might behoove this guy to do some due diligence in the space, or maybe take time to explain how his designs are better than current apps. Also, while his designs look "nice", they are over-designed and would start looking stale very quickly. When you're building a product that is used on a daily basis, less "design" is more. But I'm sure as a result of this post, he'll find some clients and make some money from it, so good for him.

ezy 14y ago

This person needs to try outlook. You see, there's a little flag you can click on next to the email with a task priority. And a todo bar/list which shows them in priority order. Not only has it existed before, but it really doesn't help that much. You still need to apply yourself to use it correctly. This doesn't change that. Sigh... but then I knew I was in for wheel re-invention as soon as I saw the "modern creative workflow" sales bullshit. Perhaps there's something to be gained by making it prettier than outlook, I dunno. I feel like Alan Kay -- read about your history folks. If you're going to "re-invent email" you might want to, I don't know -- try out many different existing email clients?

hythloday 14y ago
I had a serious crack at using Outlook for this a few years ago and I found it woefully inadequate. Outlook tasks are either todo or done. There's no way of monitoring "waiting on Alice for confirmation", "waiting for Bob's approval of the finished work". Related to this, the task list seems to only display one-dimensionally, e.g. I couldn't put together a useful list of my more important tasks that were due later this week alongside my less-important tasks due today. Also, tasks are effectively a pointer to an email. There's no way of tying together disparate emails into a single task. Lastly, I found myself wanting to really use tasks as a something like "tag annotations" - I'd be having 2 or 3 conversations about optimization in the team and want to note them all together along with a high-level view of things to do before and after. I quite like Outlook and would love its task system to be more useful, enough so that I've thought of putting work into it to make it what I want. The fact is, though, that it doesn't really do most of what the author of the article wants, and it definitely isn't suitable as anything more than building blocks for a workflow system.
pault 14y ago
To be fair, as far as I can tell this is only a concept by a UI designer, created as a portfolio piece. I believe the its purpose isn't to reinvent email as much as it is to show off his knowledge of graphic design and CSS transforms.
Too 14y ago
I've also tried outlooks tasks and while it's good as one-off reminders it doesn't solve the big problem with email, and neither will this mockup that doesn't even propose anything else than the action-lists. The problem with email is that all information you need is everywhere! It's a matter of discipline. Labels only solve half the issue. To start with we've got improper headlines, emails with information about many, totally unrelated tasks, replies to old messages in same conversation - this breaks threading in every email client i've tried, especially if many different senders jump in and out of the conversation.

SeoxyS 14y ago

As a designer, the OP should know better than to design webpages as a giant <img> tag... It's unreadable on my Retina MBP.

porker 14y ago

Immediate thoughts: From a business perspective, 3 steps like that isn't enough. What I really want is email completely integrated with a CRM/Project management tool & a calendar - I have tried Googl Apps and the whole Email / Tasks / Calendar separation just doesn't work. From what I've seen Exchange comes close, and I believe one of the others (Zimbra?) does too. The problem with email is everyone uses it differently. The email client that works for my work emails won't work for my personal email account and vice versa. Minimalist for GMail is nice, it starts to improve by removing clutter: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfddepdpdafhhepdbek https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfdde... and I wouldn't be without it. I totally agree about typography - it would make a massive difference. But not just here, everywhere. Grouping email is another problem - I've tried folders (one per email, not enough), tags/labels (unmanageable). This is symtomatic of our whole digital information management issue - how do we deal with so much flexible information? Hence my need for a CRM/tasks/todo app on top of email. [Background: I run a small company, it's growing, and managing projects/developers/clients/email is a headache. If you've found a way to reduce the pain, say!]

jorangreef 14y ago
Am working on this. Please leave your email at https://ronomon.com https://ronomon.com and I will let you know when it's ready.

jetz 14y ago

Email nor anything related to core email protocols do not need to be fixed or redesigned. It's doing what it was supposed to be used for and still doing it very well. Over the years desktop and web mail people have added too much and its 70s design idea of anyone can send mail to any other's inbox (btw, creative idea at the time worked till 2000s) have cooperatively decreased its usage. We still need this universal and mature protocol but we should do a different thing for communication. period.

jph 14y ago

Mail-Pilot is awesome for email as an inbox. Take a look at Mail-Pilot.com and how it has read later, tasks, connections to people, and more. Disclosure that I'm one of their backers.

herbig 14y ago

Typo: http://www.vanschneider.com/wp-content/themes/vanschneider/images/about_header.png http://www.vanschneider.com/wp-content/themes/vanschneider/i...

ereckers 14y ago

The take away here should be, if you're going to spend time redesigning email clients, you should take an equal or greater amount of time laying it out on your website. So much for sharing ideas. When half the comments trash your WordPress template before they even get to the subject, you know it's a tough crowd.

eschulte 14y ago

GNUS already supports all of the features proposed by this article (including personalized pictures) and it has been around since the early 90s. edit: s/early 90s/late 80s/

mariusmg 14y ago

Horrible site. The text is served as jpg image. This guy can't get the basics right but it's designing "experiences"....

rubergly 14y ago

Looking at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1072027/Screenshots/1z.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1072027/Screenshots/1z.png, I find the comment about "perfect spacing and clean typography" almost laughable. I also prefer design that incorporates smart typography to convey importance and structure. His app mockups seem to show an understanding of this, but the site layout in general (especially this section) does not. (1) why is the "We spend a huge amount of our day..." text in red? (2) why is that text smaller than the previous chunk of text? (3) why is that entire previous chunk of text italicized? (4) how is "Mark as read is useless..." at all related to "Emails aren't just emails anymore"? why are these in the same paragraph? "Mark as read" seems like it should be the beginning of a list of complaints about email, not the supporting sentence for "Emails aren't just emails anymore" -- this just comes off as extremely bad flow of thought, and the typography makes it more confusing. (5) why is the heading for each of the boxes split into all-caps tiny text and no-caps large text? the idea in itself isn't terrible, but the tiny text is too tiny, and the splitting into tiny and large text isn't consistent -- clearly it's meant so that the large text can be read on its own and the tiny text adds to the experience upon closer inspection, and so putting the "and" at the end of the "A clean and" tiny text for the first box makes sense, but then why is the "and" at the beginning of the "and clean typograhpy" large text in the second box?

myoffe 14y ago

Leave email alone. It's doing it's job 95% alright. Just use a reasonable client (e.g. http://mail.google.com http://mail.google.com, Sparrow) and there is really almost nothing to complain about. The problem is that we are using email for everything. Since Facebook, people rarely send pictures to each other anymore. Since Blogging, people rarely send long personal stories to 100 friends. Etc', etc... Slowly and carefully we find the right alternatives to the default, which is email. If you need task management, use Asana or something. It's really good, and it integrates with email quite well. Also, Trello is excellent as a flexible Kanban board. It's all about finding and using (rigorously) the right tool. Don't force everything you need in computing into email, and you won't have to reinvent email. I really doubt email will change at all. Maybe it will die, or be less common. But it will not change. It's so simple, why change it anyway?

backspace 14y ago

Wow, haven't read such a vaporware article in awhile. The author promises a "I'm going to change 30+ years of email UI/UX" and instead proposes 4 different labels and a workflow that works for him. Yup, you revolutionalized email alright.

vlokshin 14y ago

At first I was going to commend the author on being a UI/UX reincarnation of Dieter Rams (I know he isn't dead yet, so that's not quite logical). Then I realize the entire page was all images. Why???

runjake 14y ago

Nevermind classic email clients, let's begin with the method the author used to make his point. It's a verbose mish-mash of disjointed text flow and pseudo-infographics. It does not flow well at all. From what I can tell, you can achieve his vision of an email client by changing preferences in Mountain Lion's Mail.app client, so his vision is here today (well, soon).

patrickmay 14y ago

I'm not going to take design advice from a website that thinks it knows better than I do how wide my browser window should be.

christiangenco 14y ago

Please, please, please - for the love of all that is good and grammatical - change "noone" to "no one" as quickly as you can possibly photoshop in mail2.jpeg. This single error tainted your argument (for me, at least) for the rest of the page.

sramsay 14y ago

I take the point about clutter and typography, but the best email client I have ever used is nmh <http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/> http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/>, largely because I was able to hack together this kind of work flow effortlessly. I'm always marveling at how modern clients lack the capabilities I have in a piece of software that has changed little since the RAND Corporation put it together decades ago.

ricardobeat 14y ago

Title should be Redesigning Sparrow :) The design is clearly inspired in Sparrow, which already does the facebook pictures thing, nice typography and all. It's only missing the "action levels" (you can only mark as favorite/important).

alexwolfe 14y ago

I think it's an interesting UI design and concept and has some strong visual appeal to it. I realize a lot of the concepts in this design have been tried before in one way or another. However, just as important as the design is seeing how if actually feels. I think it certainly looks good in photoshop but the trick is executing in a way that makes it feel "right" too. Any plans for development?

RobMcCullough 14y ago

Slightly unrelated but your portfolio webpage is absolutely gorgeous!

JBiserkov 14y ago

Microsoft (Outlook+Exchange+Lync (formerly Office Communicator))

twelvechairs 14y ago

I feel sorry for the author here. Its very easy to criticise and hard to create. There are a lot of people here trying to tear him down. If you know better - stop sitting around on Hackernews and go make it. If not, then stop whining when someone is trying to do something constructive - or at the very least provide some points you think he can fix and be nice about it, not like a petulant 12-year old...

PaulHoule 14y ago

Many of the facile assumptions designers make about email are wrong. The sanebox service, for instance, has the same wrong assumption -- that the problem is spam and unimportant emails. The toughest problem I have in email management is important emails that are difficult to answer. For instance, before I took off for San Diego this week, I had to answer an email that required a prompt reply. This email involved an important relationship for which the circumstances had radically changed -- I wasn't sure what I wanted out of the situation or what I could do for the other party. Given an email like that, my natural temptation is to put off dealing with them, so I have a plug of "important and somewhat urgent" messages sitting in my box at any time. Spam and other unimportant messages, on the other hand, can be deleted in seconds, and pose very little cognitive load. If there's any real cost of dealing with spam it's that I have an itchy trigger finger and occasionally delete an email that I shouldn't.

bradgessler 14y ago

This looks almost identical to Sparrow with the exception that Sparrow simply uses a star as an action item.

gcr 14y ago

Is anyone else seriously disturbed by the layout? The whole page is a big giant JPEG full of unscalable, unsearchable text. Google doesn't read .JPEGs. Kiss your SEO goodbye. I can't zoom into a page like this. When I do, it's pixelated and you've somehow managed to screw up the horizontal scrollbar so I can't even read the text on the left and right sides. This also makes the site completely unbearable under any screen resolution smaller than 1280x1024.

beilabs 14y ago

Just going to pimp a startup working out of Sydney called ZeroMail. zeromail.com is a real product looking to shake up the traditional email client. Best of luck to them!

krollew 14y ago

Yeah. So why you didn't earned bilions of dolars on new, great e-mail clients? Maybe it's not what people needs, huh?

alan_cx 14y ago

Dont know about any one else, but I couldn't close the window fast enough after the page loaded. It just assaulted my brain. I have no idea why. It literally repelled me. Quite strange.

gasuns 14y ago

Like PostBox only online.

RyanMcGreal 14y ago

Forgive me if I'm missing something, but I already have this with my Thunderbird email client, which allows me to assign tags with customizable names and colours and to sort my emails into an arbitrary set of folders.

tshadwell 14y ago

Have you taken a look at the code? It's disgusting, seriously.