Should an email client have a philosophy? For many people, email is
-one of our primary means of communication. Something so important
-ought to warrant a little thought.
+one of our primary means of communication, and email archives are an
+integral part of our long-term memory. Something so important ought to
+warrant a little thought.
Here's Sup's philosophy.
Using "traditional" email clients today is increasingly problematic.
Anyone who's on a high-traffic mailing list knows this. My ruby-talk
folder is 430 megs and Mutt sits there for 60 seconds while it opens
-it. Keeping up with the all the new traffic is painful, even with
+it. Keeping up with the all the new traffic is impossible, even with
Mutt's excellent threading features, simply because there's so much of
it. A single thread can span several pages in the folder index view
-alone! And Mutt is probably the fastest email client out there, and
-certainly most featureful and in terms of threading and mailing list
-support. God help me if I try and throw Thunderbird at that.
+alone! And Mutt is probably the fastest, most mailing-list aware email
+client out there. God help me if I try and use Thunderbird.
-The principle problem with traditional clients is that they deal with
+The problem with traditional clients like Mutt is that they deal with
individual pieces of email. This places a high mental cost on the user
for each incoming email, by forcing them to ask: Should I keep this
-email, or delete it? If I keep it, where should I file it? For
-example, I've spent the last 10 years of my life laboriously
-hand-filing every email message I received and feeling a mild sense of
-panic every time an email was both "from Mom" and "about school". The
-massive amounts of email that many people receive, and the cheap cost
-of storage, have made these questions both more costly and less useful
-to answer.
+email, or delete it? If I keep it, where should I file it? I've spent
+the last 10 years of my life laboriously hand-filing every email
+message I received and feeling a mild sense of panic every time an
+email was both "from Mom" and "about school". The massive amounts of
+email that many people receive, and the cheap cost of storage, have
+made these questions both more costly and less useful to answer.
-I think Gmail has taken the right approach. As a long-time Mutt user,
-I was pretty much blown away when I first saw people use Gmail,
-because I saw them treat email differently from how I ever had. I saw
-that making certain operations quantitatively easier (namely, search)
-resulted in a qualitative difference in usage. You didn't have to
-worry about filing things into folders correctly, because you could
-just find things later by searching for them. I also saw how
-thread-centrism was advantageous over message-centrism when message
-volume was high: if nothing else, there's simply less of them.
+Contrast that with using Gmail. As a long-time Mutt user, I was blown
+away when I first saw someone use Gmail. They treated their email
+differently from how I ever had. They never filed email and they never
+deleted it. They relied on an immediate, global, full-text search, and
+thread-level tagging, to do everything I'd ever done with Mutt, but
+with a trivial cost to the user at message receipt time.
-Much of the inspiration for Sup was based on Gmail. I think it's to
+From Gmail I learned that making certain operations quantitatively
+easier (namely, search) resulted in a qualitative improvement in
+usage. I also learned how thread-centrism was advantageous over
+message-centrism when message volume was high: most of the time, a
+message and its context deserve the same treatment. I think it's to
the Gmail designers' credit that they started with a somewhat ad-hoc
idea (hey, we're really good at search engines, so maybe we can build
an email client on top of one) and managed to build something that was
imagine in happened. Maybe they knew what they were doing from the
start.
-But ultimately, Gmail wasn't right for me (fuck top posting and HTML
-mail), which is why the idea for Sup was born.
+Unfortunately, there's a lot to Gmail I can't tolerate (top posting,
+HTML mail, one-level threads, and ads come to mind, never mind the
+fact that it's not FOSS). Thus Sup was born.
Sup is based on the following principles, which I stole directly from
Gmail:
- An immediately accessible and fast search capability over the entire
- email archive eliminates most of the need for folders, and
- eliminates the necessity of having to ever delete email.
+ email archive eliminates most of the need for folders, and most of
+ the necessity of deleting email.
- Labels eliminate what little need for folders search doesn't cover.
application, the usefulness of multiple buffers, the necessity of
handling multiple email accounts, etc. But those are just details!
-Let me know what you think.
+Try it and let me know what you think.
projects / sup / blobdiff