Published Dec 7, 2003
For all its ubiquity, the Web is not the Internet’s killer app — e-mail is. Every day, more bytes of e-mail messages than bytes of html documents transit the net. Given how much most business rely on e-mail, it’s surprising how awful most e-mail clients are at organizing the daily stream of information that bombards users daily. IBM researchers have fascinating ideas about how to build a better e-mail client.
I’ve been using e-mail since 1993. My first e-mail client was Pine, a command-line mail browser run in a terminal window. It ran directly on the mail server, was therefore incredibly fast and I could set it up to use any text editor I liked to compose mail. I still miss Pine (it’s still commonly used, often in combination with Mutt — I could install both of these applications on my PowerBook, under OSX, and may choose to do so yet).
Later on, my college began to offer remote SMTP and POP connectivity, so I switched to the old Netscape Communicator. I didn’t love the interface, but I did love that the amount of mail I could save was no longer limited by how much disk space I had left in my account on the server. I didn’t much care for the slow Communicator, so I switched to Outlook Express. I liked OE, it was fast, easy-to-use and had a good address book.
At work, once I graduated, I used QuickMail, which was light on most features. But this was the first time I really needed to organize e-mail, and QuickMail was pretty good at this. I could nest and color-code folders and even incoming e-mail, and I was pretty enchanted that the colors in my mail matched the colors of the file folders I used to organize my filing cabinet.
My next job was in a PC-centric office, so I needed to switch to a mail client that ran on a PC. I tried the cult favorite Eudora and hated it. Settings were hidden and, worst of all it was hard to organize my incoming e-mail. I missed, in particular, the color-coding that had made it so easy to spot important e-mails in QuickMail.
So I switched to Outlook. And I fell in love. Sure, I’d heard all of the negative things about security and stability, but I loved the full-featured address book, the integrated calendar, the task list. I still missed colors.
Working for myself, I switched back to a Mac. But I had new faith in Microsoft’s e-mail programs, so I tried Entourage. And that was the best ever. I could color-code everything, there were powerful filters that could move incoming e-mails to various folders automatically, and I could match e-mails to entries in my address book and items on my task list.
Then I upgraded to Mac OS X. Sadly, I lost Entourage. Apple’s built-in Mail was light on the filtering power and had an interface I hated, but it integrated with the new system-wide address book. Now I’m on Mailsmith, which has incredible filters, integration with the system address book, and color-coding. I’m happy, but not ecstatic.
What am I not thrilled about? Well, mostly the shortcoming the aforementioned IBM researchers talk about in their paper — no ability to visualize the relationship between mail messages, no ability to show and hide irrelevant messages, no ability to file messages in multiple places and no ability to relate e-mail to calendar events, contacts, etc. I’d be excited to try a product like ReMail.
E-mail becomes central to more people’s lives every day. A better client is badly needed. The Web shows us what a network that relates information even moderately well can do; if e-mail clients did a solid job of organizing and relating incoming messages, the value of the medium would be massively increased.