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Everybody uses email differently. Any one person proposing a "solution" to email or a new client design or workflow or whatever is going to be shouted down by t

by saulrh 14y ago

Everybody uses email differently. Any one person proposing a "solution" to email or a new client design or workflow or whatever is going to be shouted down by the 90% of the population that doesn't do it the same way. The best thing, then, might be to let everybody design their own email client. I'm imagining something that lets you drag around GUI widgets like "this email has a to-do item associated", "displays this email's author", or "mark this email as being high/medium/low priority". Provide a few layout tools, maybe a really simple domain-specific scripting language in case someone wants a widget that you didn't provide, and everybody's happy.

anujkk 14y ago
I would rather try to make that 10% of the population happy than try to make everyone happy. I can't do that and I don't know anyone who can do that. I'm sure if I can delight 10% of existing email users to a level where they are ready to pay me it is going to be big, very big.
- vr000m 14y ago
  The big advantage of email is its federation and no need for end-to-end connectivity (Store and Forward paradigm). Today due to cloud computing this could be attempted as a monolithic service and the messages can be stored in the cloud until delivery (or even afterwards). So a new email protocol should take into account if it needs federation (distributed) or not and what would be the intended reach.
TimJRobinson 14y ago
Very true, perhaps something along the lines of sublime text. So at it's core it's just a fast simple email client. Then have a really nice plugin system so people can create their own plugins really easily to customize it or add functionality as they like. Of course non-geeks won't really understand installing plugins however others could create services (whitelabel versions) that have a bunch of plugins pre-installed so they work well out of the box.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
nicholassmith 14y ago
That sounds similar to the Steve Jobs Calculator Construction Set story (http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Calculator_Construction_Set.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...). For the 90% of people I imagine until something much better is forced upon them they'll be perfectly happy with what they have, be it Gmail or Outlook. For the people who want a better experience, I imagine a lot of them will have the technical ability to strike forth and do it. Essentially what you want is a backend message server and then let people communicate with it however they fancy with a high level API they can plug into their widget toolkit of choice if you go down that route. If you're into C++/Qt there's already a solution that does that (http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2009/09/21/introducing-qmf-an-advanced-mobile-messaging-framework/ http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2009/09/21/introducing-qmf-an-advan...).

by saulrh 14y ago

anujkk 14y ago

I would rather try to make that 10% of the population happy than try to make everyone happy. I can't do that and I don't know anyone who can do that. I'm sure if I can delight 10% of existing email users to a level where they are ready to pay me it is going to be big, very big.

vr000m 14y ago
The big advantage of email is its federation and no need for end-to-end connectivity (Store and Forward paradigm). Today due to cloud computing this could be attempted as a monolithic service and the messages can be stored in the cloud until delivery (or even afterwards). So a new email protocol should take into account if it needs federation (distributed) or not and what would be the intended reach.

TimJRobinson 14y ago

Very true, perhaps something along the lines of sublime text. So at it's core it's just a fast simple email client. Then have a really nice plugin system so people can create their own plugins really easily to customize it or add functionality as they like. Of course non-geeks won't really understand installing plugins however others could create services (whitelabel versions) that have a bunch of plugins pre-installed so they work well out of the box.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

nicholassmith 14y ago

That sounds similar to the Steve Jobs Calculator Construction Set story (http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Calculator_Construction_Set.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...). For the 90% of people I imagine until something much better is forced upon them they'll be perfectly happy with what they have, be it Gmail or Outlook. For the people who want a better experience, I imagine a lot of them will have the technical ability to strike forth and do it. Essentially what you want is a backend message server and then let people communicate with it however they fancy with a high level API they can plug into their widget toolkit of choice if you go down that route. If you're into C++/Qt there's already a solution that does that (http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2009/09/21/introducing-qmf-an-advanced-mobile-messaging-framework/ http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2009/09/21/introducing-qmf-an-advan...).