Sunday, October 23, 2005

Brent Simmons: What’s frustrating is the sense that, by the year 2005, we should have a great email client. It’s not like it’s new technology. It could be done. The problem is the economics. (Via inessential.com.) There's the economics, sure, but I disagree about “It’s not like it’s new technology”. There's a lot that we don't know about how people use email, and how to serve them. Email serves as communication, reminder, to-do list, database, long-term memory, ... Different people have very different requirements. For example, I'm sure that Apple's Mail.app is pretty good for many people, but it is too slow for people like me that keep very large active mailboxes. I want to search by several criteria (messages from X containing terms Y and Z before date D with these types of attachments). I want fast ranked search, I use my email collection as a database of what I'm working on or have worked on. GMail is better, but I want to be able to access my email offline, and I have a decade or more of stored email that I want to search. In any case, I really want my email and all my other documents, from code to papers, to be searchable uniformly. Apple Spotlight goes a bit that way, but again it does not allow complex searches. The real problem here is that mass production of software doesn't fit well such a wide variety of requirements. 5:22:13 PM