17 ms·
Best of luck w/ the implementation. However, reading the concept, I am unimpressed. In Mail.app, I can already mark e-mails with different-colored flags, which
by astral303 14y ago
Best of luck w/ the implementation. However, reading the concept, I am unimpressed.
In Mail.app, I can already mark e-mails with different-colored flags, which allows me to come up with my own "get back soon" or "get back later" type of a system.
The assertion that e-mail hasn't changed since 1970's is false. Modern e-mail clients manage it much better. Compare Mail.app, Outlook and GMail to PINE--the difference is staggering. The true innovator in the e-mail space has been GMail, which has brought things like autosave, concepts such as embracing the fact that it is not truly productive to file every single e-mail into a purposeful folder, embracing that tagging is better than folders. GMail also really pushed the conversational view and presented it in a single-screen way that was innovative (compare how long it took e-mail clients to catch up with that... and no, "group by thread" did not compare).
I'm also very wary of anyone advertising "clean typography." People start adding spacing and now I only end up previewing 2/3rds of what I could preview in one screenful.
- irahul 14y ago> concepts such as embracing the fact that it is not truly productive to file every single e-mail into a purposeful folder, embracing that tagging is better than folders. I don't know if it was there from the beginning, but I have always used rules which say "apply filter and skip inbox" effectively giving me separate folders. To each his own; I don't like kitchen-sink inbox, and like separate folders to just tagging.
- nailer 14y agoSure, re: skipping inbox, me too. But tagging allows you to have a folder-like appearance but removes to 1:1 relationship. I can have a folder of 'emails sent to me specifically' and an 'emails from my accountant' that happens to have the same message. This is super useful.
- jfb 14y agoGMail freed us from the tyranny of trying to build a single ontology for organizing email. To me it's the most radical and admirable thing Google has done by some measure. I would very much like to see this approach applied to other areas of HCI. The fewer flawed assumptions baked into semantics, te better.
- charltones 14y agoThis is a great feature but is older than GMail. Lotus Notes mail for instance allowed the same mail to appear in different views, including an "all documents" view that had, as you might expect, everything in it. This advance was rather let down by the rest of the Notes client interface however: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/lotus.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/lotus.htm
- drumdance 14y agoWow, blast from the past. My first serious use of email was Lotus Notes. It had some really cool features but also really strange ones, such as using the escape key to send a message.
- hboon 14y agoTagging also existed in Opera's email client as virtual folders, back when it was known as M2.
- chmike 14y agoAnd zimbra
- pyre 14y agoThe issue with Gmail is that you can't affect the order in which the filters are applied. For example: A error email gets sent to a development mailing list. Normally I tag all of the mailing list emails, and skip the inbox. - What if I want the error email to stay in my inbox, but only if it's an error email? - What if I want that email to get tagged as "ERRORS" and "DEV_LIST" and skip the Inbox? I have to do weird filters like: filter #1 - if list:DEV_LIST and not subject:ERROR then tag w/ DEV_LIST and skip Inbox filter #2 - if list:DEV_LIST and subject:ERROR then tag w/ DEV_LIST and tag w/ ERROR or: filter #1 - if list:DEV_LIST and not subject:ERROR then tag w/ DEV_LIST and skip Inbox filter #2 - if list:DEV_LIST and subject:ERROR then tag w/ DEV_LIST and tag w/ ERROR and skip Inbox As you can imagine that these can get quite unwieldy.
- mike-cardwell 14y agoI don't use GMail so I've never come across their filtering before, but that looks crap. Sieve is much more flexible. And they could have also implemented ManageSieve so people with mail clients which support the protocol could configure their filtering rules directly from their mta.
- rmc 14y agoreally pushed the conversational view and presented it in a single-screen way that was innovative (compare how long it took e-mail clients to catch up with that... and no, "group by thread" did not compare). I love GMail's conversation view, but AFAIK, not really many other desktop email clients have adopted it. Who else has it?
- buddylw 14y agoI'm not really a fan of MS Outlook, but I am forced to use it at work. It does have support for conversation grouping though. Just do "arrange by" -> "show as conversations" from the context menu.
- wonderzombie 14y agoApple Mail has it. I think you can tell it whether you want to see newest-first or the reverse, as well.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- danneu 14y agoActually, Mail.app's lack of conversation view was one of its definitive dealbreakers for me. In particular, it doesn't include you or your sent mail in the conversation (http://i.imgur.com/Atkcu.png http://i.imgur.com/Atkcu.png). It only lets you expand the email quotation to let you dig through nested context (http://i.imgur.com/1Zj2e.png http://i.imgur.com/1Zj2e.png). Compare this to gmail (http://i.imgur.com/mLel3.png http://i.imgur.com/mLel3.png) that actually handles it as a conversation. It's one of the reasons I use Mailplane (thin wrapper around gmail) instead of Mail.app.
- taylorfausak 14y agoI too was frustrated by Mail.app's lack of a proper conversation view. Turns out, there's a setting to show messages you sent. In the "Viewing" section of Mail.app's preferences, enable "Include related messages". http://imgur.com/i5Eaq http://imgur.com/i5Eaq
- danielweber 14y agoI like most of this but Gmail's tagging has been so burdensome and then hard to use the results of such that I've given up on it entirely. I like being able to sort things away that I don't read often, but GMail told me I didn't want a "read untagged messages" view so it wouldn't let me do that.
- dboat 14y agoOpen message, "Create filter from this message," add an appropriate label, check skip the inbox and automatically label and your folders are good to go. I wasn't keen on gmail's insistence that labels were all I needed either, but I find this workflow agreeable.
- reddiric 14y ago> The true innovator in the e-mail space has been GMail, which has brought things like autosave, Small nit, Outlook 2003 had AutoSave. GMail was publicly introduced in 2004. > embracing the fact that it is not truly productive to file every single e-mail into a purposeful folder That's the "Inbox" > embracing that tagging is better than folders. I'm pretty sure that Outlook has had categories (the color-coded custom named things that can be multiply applied to emails) since 2000ish.
- aimatt 14y agoSomeone loves Outlook
- hussam 14y agoI'm a dedicated GMail user, but I think it's good to give credit where credit is due. Autosave was definitely not first in GMail. Thunderbird also allowed messages to be sorted by thread a while back (which you could argue was a rough precursor to GMail's conversation view).
- ericingram 14y agoI really like Outlook. I switched to Gmail this year because I wanted free e-mail and Gmail is easier to configure. But, as a client, I enjoyed Outlook much more than I do Gmail.
- mike-cardwell 14y agoSo why don't you just point Outlook at GMail?
- nailer 14y ago>> embracing the fact that it is not truly productive to file every single e-mail into a purposeful folder >That's the "Inbox" In Outlook terms it's search folders.
- neya 14y agoEverything you say is very valid, and I whole-heartedly agree with you. In fact, the designer of this app truly doesn't understand the philosophy of choosing colors. Being minimalistic is a bad idea when you don't know what you're doing. For example, there are reasons why a link is in blue and 'call-to-action' buttons are in red (like the 'Compose' button, as in Gmail). The purpose of red is to let the user know its something 'important'. The designer of this app in question chooses to ignore these UX concepts and seems to choose beauty and aesthetics over these fundamentals and over-uses the red color (even his navbar is in full red..duh). And that's truly a bad sign for someone wanting to show themselves/their products as professional, especially when the selling point IS the UX.
- samstave 14y agoJust off the top of my head you know what I would like to see as an email interface: Reddit. Each headline being the suvject being an email with all the comments being the replies. Different users can reply in a threaded way to all the recipients of the message etc. Obviously it would need in-line attachements and in-line pictures. It would be interesting to allow a vote system on messages. Rather than file them, you down or up vote them. But in your box, you have more than one vote so you can apply more or less weight to info. Along with tags and groups and many other things that I can think of... That would be cool.
- gokhan 14y ago> Each headline being the suvject being an email with all the comments being the replies. As in Gmail?
- cookingrobot 14y agoBut when you open a message with lots of replies, there's no structure, and you can't reply to one person's comment (like I'm replying to your comment here). This would be messy in gmail.