4 ms·

It has. It is called IMAP. Joking aside, what would you want in API ? Search is something that gmail does better than most clients so that should be there

bonaldi 18y ago
Conversations. You know, that threading-done-right they have that people love -- with a few holdouts -- but that no other email client has yet done correctly (and, no, an indented list of message titles isn't nearly the same thing, nor is IMAP THREAD's "same subject? Must be the same thread!"). There's a fair amount of deduction goes into Gmail's conversation ordering -- it's quite hard to fool -- and an API that allowed you to treat conversations as the primary unit instead of messages would be great. This article is right that the inbox needs to get smarter, and GMail is the closest to it yet. But while they're furiously adding frills around the outside, they've made very little changes of the sort suggested. Even easy things are missing: eg, why can't I click on a "from" header and automatically see all messages sent from that person? In fact, it's mostly small changes like this that could bring GMail much closer to what the author is looking for. Sure, being able to pull in Facebook interactions isn't going to happen, but a desktop client could certainly do that. Which brings us back to hoping for a GMail API.
- briansmith 18y ago
  I've never seen Outlook's conversation view get things wrong.
- moe 18y ago
  Conversations. You know, that threading-done-right they have that people love -- with a few holdouts -- Oh, you mean that useless representation that breaks down as soon as a third party gets involved and that google forces upon us even in their abysmal "groups" product that everyone insists on using nowadays? Referring to conversations as "threading done right" is the worst joke I've heard in a while. It's subset of what most e-mail clients already do with their collapsible threading based on message-id and subject and could be trivially added to same mail clients without loosing the advantages of real threading. The reason why that hasn't happened (except in niche products) is because most people just don't consider it a worthwhile feature. It has actually done more harm than good to the e-mail ecosystem because it encourages TOFU which annoys the hell out of people using regular mail clients and completely blows up on mailing lists. Edit: I just learned that outlook apparently has a conversation view. Well, why am I not surprised...
  - bonaldi 18y ago
    It's never failed me on multiple-party messages, and it's especially useful on mailing lists. What it isn't is a subset of threading. The crucial difference -- and this is why it can't be "trivially" added to mail clients -- is that it treats a conversation as a fundamental unit, not a message. That means I see the entire back-and-forth on one page, including my replies, not a basket full of subject lines I have to click through. Even just getting my replies into a thread seems beyond most mail clients that I've seen (short of a client-killing smart basket that includes my monster sent mail folder). Still, though, I did say there were holdouts. Hi there.
    - moe 18y ago
      The fundamental difference -- and this is why it can't be "trivially" added to mail clients -- is that it treats a conversation as a fundamental unit, not a message. As you've apparently never used a desktop mail client before, here's a screenshot of what the tinydns mailing list looks like for me: http://is.gd/uumd http://is.gd/uumd I have no idea what you mean by "treats conversations as units". The same could be said for any threaded view I guess. Except that the threaded view also exposes the nesting, which is quite a bit more helpful on mailing lists than a flat view that jumps randomly between levels. That means I see the entire back-and-forth on one page, including my replies, not a basket full of subject lines I have to click through. Yes, that's nice and fancy for 1:1 conversations. Once you participate in a mailing list you'll happily trade in the lazyness for a structured view with defined anchors that provides some clues about what point and nesting level of the conversation you're currently looking at. Even just getting the replies into a thread seems beyond most mail clients that I've seen. As you can see in my screenshot this works just fine. In fact it has been working fine for almost 30 years. Usenet is based on this mechanism. Did "most E-mail clients you have seen" happen to be web-based?
      - bonaldi 18y ago
        I refuse to make you a screenshot of gmail, so I'll just ask: what are the contents of all those messages? You don't know, because your client allows you to read a message a time. Gmail lets you read a conversation at a time. Massive difference. [Edit since I'm now on a real keyboard] I have no idea what you mean by "treats conversations as units". The same could be said for any threaded view I guess. What I mean is that the atom of the mail client is an entire conversation. So when I move it to another folder (or label it in Gmail parlance) all the related messages get grouped, or flagged or whatever. You can do some operations at an individual message level so the metaphor's not overpoweringly intrusive, but for general day-to-day operation, the conversation is the unit you deal with. Except that the threaded view also exposes the nesting, which is quite a bit more helpful on mailing lists than a flat view that jumps randomly between levels. There's nothing about conversations that prevents this. Look at Hacker News: it has both all-posts-on-a-page and nesting. Would you prefer that the comments view was just a list of timestamps and poster names and you had to individually click each one to see the comment? No? Yet that's what most mailing list clients and archives make you do. Yes, that's nice and fancy for 1:1 conversations. ... which are the primary use of email for millions of people. I'm not sure why you're so quick to condemn something that would be such a massive leap in usability for so many email users and that doesn't exclude your preferred method of operation. I personally prefer to read mailing lists and usenet in thread-to-page, just as I prefer to see the contents of online comment threads and instant messages all in one screenful. You may not. But as you've said, virtually every half-decent mail client of the past 30 years can handle message-level threading. But I want more. I actually wonder if the prevalence of mailing list-centric attitudes like yours among engineers is the reason we don't have mail clients with proper conversations yet. I actually suspect that it's still simply too hard: you have to sort and search potentially tens of thousands of messages just to display one conversation, and the easier route is just to make the human do the work. But I'd far rather my (or Google's) computer did it for me.
- nirmal 18y ago
  I believe GMail adds things to the header to help it track the conversation. This along with time-based subject matching allows it to handle most cases easily.
  - nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
    Every proper email client has done this for at least the past ten years. It's the message-id and in-reply-to headers that allow for proper message threading.

bonaldi 18y ago

Conversations. You know, that threading-done-right they have that people love -- with a few holdouts -- but that no other email client has yet done correctly (and, no, an indented list of message titles isn't nearly the same thing, nor is IMAP THREAD's "same subject? Must be the same thread!"). There's a fair amount of deduction goes into Gmail's conversation ordering -- it's quite hard to fool -- and an API that allowed you to treat conversations as the primary unit instead of messages would be great. This article is right that the inbox needs to get smarter, and GMail is the closest to it yet. But while they're furiously adding frills around the outside, they've made very little changes of the sort suggested. Even easy things are missing: eg, why can't I click on a "from" header and automatically see all messages sent from that person? In fact, it's mostly small changes like this that could bring GMail much closer to what the author is looking for. Sure, being able to pull in Facebook interactions isn't going to happen, but a desktop client could certainly do that. Which brings us back to hoping for a GMail API.

briansmith 18y ago
I've never seen Outlook's conversation view get things wrong.
moe 18y ago
Conversations. You know, that threading-done-right they have that people love -- with a few holdouts -- Oh, you mean that useless representation that breaks down as soon as a third party gets involved and that google forces upon us even in their abysmal "groups" product that everyone insists on using nowadays? Referring to conversations as "threading done right" is the worst joke I've heard in a while. It's subset of what most e-mail clients already do with their collapsible threading based on message-id and subject and could be trivially added to same mail clients without loosing the advantages of real threading. The reason why that hasn't happened (except in niche products) is because most people just don't consider it a worthwhile feature. It has actually done more harm than good to the e-mail ecosystem because it encourages TOFU which annoys the hell out of people using regular mail clients and completely blows up on mailing lists. Edit: I just learned that outlook apparently has a conversation view. Well, why am I not surprised...
- bonaldi 18y ago
  It's never failed me on multiple-party messages, and it's especially useful on mailing lists. What it isn't is a subset of threading. The crucial difference -- and this is why it can't be "trivially" added to mail clients -- is that it treats a conversation as a fundamental unit, not a message. That means I see the entire back-and-forth on one page, including my replies, not a basket full of subject lines I have to click through. Even just getting my replies into a thread seems beyond most mail clients that I've seen (short of a client-killing smart basket that includes my monster sent mail folder). Still, though, I did say there were holdouts. Hi there.
  - moe 18y ago
    The fundamental difference -- and this is why it can't be "trivially" added to mail clients -- is that it treats a conversation as a fundamental unit, not a message. As you've apparently never used a desktop mail client before, here's a screenshot of what the tinydns mailing list looks like for me: http://is.gd/uumd http://is.gd/uumd I have no idea what you mean by "treats conversations as units". The same could be said for any threaded view I guess. Except that the threaded view also exposes the nesting, which is quite a bit more helpful on mailing lists than a flat view that jumps randomly between levels. That means I see the entire back-and-forth on one page, including my replies, not a basket full of subject lines I have to click through. Yes, that's nice and fancy for 1:1 conversations. Once you participate in a mailing list you'll happily trade in the lazyness for a structured view with defined anchors that provides some clues about what point and nesting level of the conversation you're currently looking at. Even just getting the replies into a thread seems beyond most mail clients that I've seen. As you can see in my screenshot this works just fine. In fact it has been working fine for almost 30 years. Usenet is based on this mechanism. Did "most E-mail clients you have seen" happen to be web-based?
    - bonaldi 18y ago
      I refuse to make you a screenshot of gmail, so I'll just ask: what are the contents of all those messages? You don't know, because your client allows you to read a message a time. Gmail lets you read a conversation at a time. Massive difference. [Edit since I'm now on a real keyboard] I have no idea what you mean by "treats conversations as units". The same could be said for any threaded view I guess. What I mean is that the atom of the mail client is an entire conversation. So when I move it to another folder (or label it in Gmail parlance) all the related messages get grouped, or flagged or whatever. You can do some operations at an individual message level so the metaphor's not overpoweringly intrusive, but for general day-to-day operation, the conversation is the unit you deal with. Except that the threaded view also exposes the nesting, which is quite a bit more helpful on mailing lists than a flat view that jumps randomly between levels. There's nothing about conversations that prevents this. Look at Hacker News: it has both all-posts-on-a-page and nesting. Would you prefer that the comments view was just a list of timestamps and poster names and you had to individually click each one to see the comment? No? Yet that's what most mailing list clients and archives make you do. Yes, that's nice and fancy for 1:1 conversations. ... which are the primary use of email for millions of people. I'm not sure why you're so quick to condemn something that would be such a massive leap in usability for so many email users and that doesn't exclude your preferred method of operation. I personally prefer to read mailing lists and usenet in thread-to-page, just as I prefer to see the contents of online comment threads and instant messages all in one screenful. You may not. But as you've said, virtually every half-decent mail client of the past 30 years can handle message-level threading. But I want more. I actually wonder if the prevalence of mailing list-centric attitudes like yours among engineers is the reason we don't have mail clients with proper conversations yet. I actually suspect that it's still simply too hard: you have to sort and search potentially tens of thousands of messages just to display one conversation, and the easier route is just to make the human do the work. But I'd far rather my (or Google's) computer did it for me.
nirmal 18y ago
I believe GMail adds things to the header to help it track the conversation. This along with time-based subject matching allows it to handle most cases easily.
- nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
  Every proper email client has done this for at least the past ten years. It's the message-id and in-reply-to headers that allow for proper message threading.