Whatever happened to the email app? Is the email program dead? Did the whole world just migrate away from Hotmail over to Facebook when we weren't looking? Does anyone else care? Weirdly, the answer seems to be yes, yes, and no. Email has never gone away, and its advantages are unique: but the email client seems to be going the way of the Gopher. Which is a bit …
I usually find Andrew's articles to be a good read - whether you agree or not they prompt debate - and wish more of them had comments enabled (good piece on Spotify vs music-buying, btw, although 0.6m from 35.2m is a decline of <2% yoy, so not necessarily much to talk about just yet).
However, on this one, it would appear things have gone a bit haywire.
" Did the whole world just migrate away from Hotmail over to Facebook when we weren't looking?"
er... no. Long term trends show that Hotmail unique figures have stayed at worst steady, at best have climbed slightly over the last 3 years, even while Facebook goes on the rampage.
"Microsoft dropped the email client from Windows 7, the rebranded version of Outlook it calls Windows Live Mail".
er... no. It was Outlook Express, and my guess is that it was either dropped as part of its efforts to appease everyone by unbundling software, or because there was no further development of it.
Interestingly, research from various sources suggests that it's IM that's been the big loser from TwitFace - even with Facebook's 'IM' client being absolute rubbish - while email retains a very different purpose and identity from the social networking sites.
Sooo.... interesting piece on email software, but the premise needs work.
Well, that all too common Outlook vs. Outlook Express confusion was not the only mistake in the product's history (and that confusion was probably the most significant reason for dropping that name).
The product was initially called bluntly Internet Mail and News (in the Windows 95 era), and was later on intgrated to IE and renamed Outlook Express. However, there is, and has never been, a thing called "Vista Mail". The Outlook Express was renamed to Windows Mail when IE7 was released, and then split from the IE product line and merged to WIndows Live product line at Windows 7 release (thus the renaming once again, to Windows Live Mail).
Example - yesterday evening around 5pm a friend sent me link via email. The mail contained one sentence and a hyperlink.
He lives less than 5 miles away, the mail took 14 hours to arrive.
email is pants - totally unreliable - IM or phone is the only reliable way of ensuring someone "gets the message".
Contrary to popular belief, email traffic is delivered as "best effort". Usually it arrives quickly, but that isn't guaranteed. Therefore it isn't the ideal medium when you need to get the message across in a hurry. Like at that school shooting in the US a while back...
I did once tell a user that if she wanted to have an email delivered quickly, she should type it all in capitals, and that the server would pick that up and give it a higher priority. :-)
1. Spam and malware are primarily responsible for the decline and fall of email, yet not even touched on.
2. Opera Mail is OK, but nothing to write home about.
3. Thunderbird is pretty good, deserving of more attention than it was given.
4. Pegasus is painfully obsolete, inexcusably buggy.
5. Eudora died of a bad business model, should have been open-sourced.
6. Email survives in the enterprise (Outlook, Lotus) and on smart mobile devices (Blackberry, Gmail Android).
7. Next time make your Subject more representative of your content; e.g., "Opera Mail survives".
"Opera mail survives, despite underwhelming mediocre interface and configuration mechanisms".. Much like the browser- runs fine, until you want an ad blocker, then you have to grub around through tonnes of broken links until you find a load of js/css to hide some ads some of the time.
Cursed by "close, but no cigar". Opera is theoretically great, but I always fall over weird omissions whenever I forget and try to use it. Opera Mini is nice, though....
make your system believe that the adserver for the offending ad lives 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0
The easiest* way to do this is by using one of the files offered on hostsfile.mine.nu . Works against all kinds of third party javascrap too in one go.
Making your local DNS server authoritative for particular domains involved in ad-peddling achieves much the same result (of course, it responds 0.0.0.0, or NXDOMAIN)
* as in, I can tell any windows user down to the level of nitwit to "download this file, uncompress it and stick the result in \windows\system32\drivers\etc ", and have it work.
Just been playing around with opera mail to a gmail account. Really fast search but the main reason I would not swap from Thunderbird is I could find no way to sync with google contacts.
Import/export yes and fine, but Zindus on Thunderbird is great and easy.
Anyone know of a widget for opera mail similar to Zindus ?
Good article though.
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Apparently, nobody else wants an application that does one thing well. Most others seem to want (or accept being shoved down their throats) applications that bundle a bunch of features together and do them all rather crappily. If you ask me, and so far nobody has, email+calendar in one app does not make sense. I would rather have a good email client and a separate but equally good calendar client.
The only reason people think we need these things together is because of Outlook. Thankfully, I have never been forced to use this crapware of an email client. I have sampled it numerous times since its birth and have always found it crap. It's also why I dislike Evolution, because it tries too hard to be Outlook.
I used Eudora for the longest time in Windows and have long switched to Thunderbird. I run Thunderbird everywhere, and it does one thing, and does it very well. I have never found a webmail client that I liked as much as either Eudora or Thunderbird, they are all lacking in one way or another, including the Blessed Gmail.
I frankly don't get social networking, and can't see ever using it as a primary mode of communication. I guess that makes me a 21st century luddite, or at least a curmudgeon. I do rather like GCal, and use it extensively. Who cares if it's not integrated with my email client of choice. I've been trying Sunbird for a desktop app, but it's still pretty early beta, and seems stuck there for the time being.
Back to the topic: screw web 2.0, give me a good set of desktop apps any day.
You don't like outlook so it must be crapware?
Bit of a strong comment from someone who's only "sampled it"
I've been using outlook for 10+ years and never had an issue with it. It synchs nicely with my phone, integrates well with the rest of the MS Office suit (including OneNote) and now that I'm on Windows 7 searching for content in emails is almost instant.
"Nobody knows your email address unless you tell them, and messages are private by default. "
Well, sort of. Over time email addresses leak to the spammers so there is a need to change or rotate them. As for privacy: not private enough. I can maintain several email accounts on my own domain and limit who is given the address and the senders I will accept for that account. But where is the email client that treats encryption as the default. In an ideal world I would send all mail encrypted to people I know who would not only provide an email address but also a public key.
"In an ideal world I would send all mail encrypted to people I know who would not only provide an email address but also a public key."
I couldn't agree more. But "Joe Average" doesn't care. Case in point: about two years ago I sent all my (non-techy) family and close friends a short e-mail saying why encryption is a good thing and how they could encrypt their e-mails. Of course, I knew that wouldn't be enough so I also bribed them with the promise of free alcohol for the first person to send me an encrypted e-mail. The result? Still not a single encrypted e-mail. I wouldn't care but it means I can't encrypt the e-mails I send them either.
So, the encryption process needs to be transparent to the end user. Plus, if everyone used public-key cryptography to digitally sign e-mails it would pretty much put an end to spam from spoofed addresses (wrong/no signature -> spam).
"Opera has been hiding an amazing email program for seven years now, in a place nobody would think of looking: in a web browser."
That's nonsense. I used to use Netscape Communicator and that was excellent for email. I well remember when someone using Outlook sent me a snottygram followed by no fewer than three cancel messages. I received the lot, and the subsequent apology!
I now use Messenger Pro on RISC OS which is also very good (there's a version for Windross). In particular it lets me read and send messages in plain text. I can't get caught by hidden web URLs, remote images and active content.
Mac Mail lets me originate messages in plain text, but if I'm replying to an html message it uses html. I really don't like it much.
What do you do when you want to check back to an old e-mail and you don't have access to your client?
What is your client? Your desktop at work? A notebook? The netbook you use when your partner is using the serious computer? A cybercafe you are using because your notebook has broken down while you're 300 or 3000 miles from home? Do you reboot into Linux/Windows to read your mail because your client (where the mail is organised) runs on Windows/Linux? And so on.
I regularly access my mail using Thunderbird from several different computers under three different O/Ses, and have occasionally accessed from quite a few more. I use Thunderbird out of choice, falling back on webmail services when Thunderbird isn't available. In all cases I see the same folder structure. Personally having my mail universally accessible and organised is far more importnat than having any particular client.
Organising my e-mail is very definitely a server-side activity!
. . . I use Notes at work, which is horrible and would be terminal if I had to use it at home as well.
At home I use Hotmail as my storage, but the mailing is done through my own domain from Hotmail.
It means my e-mail is available no matter where I am in the world, as long as I have an internet connection (pretty much always have one of those).
I used to use Outlook Express, followed by Outlook and finally Thunderbird, but had migrated almost entirely away from that by around 2001. I'm fairly certain I haven't installed an e-mail client (or used one), since switching to XP.
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"After much resistance, just over two years ago, I migrated to Gmail and have never looked back."
Did that circa 2005 while gmail was in limited invite only mode.
"which either means you are all much older than me (late 30's), "
Not really. Loads of "tech guys" have privacy/monopoly issues with the Big G.
Oh, and I'm older than you (mid 40's)
Hey, it must be my shout, have a cold one.
I am a somewhat similar techy in that I use Gmail and collect it using a web browser (at work with https forced or at home on the Mac) and an iphone (on the go - wanted an android device but live in Oz so choice limited and the JP links in with the Mac nicely as you'd expect). Use IMAP with mail organised on the server for common view.
You're right on there, pal.
Same deal here... I own a domain, can set up a fistful of separate addresses as I need them -- including a "spamtrap@" account for things like order/account-establishment confirmations, and do it all through Thunderbird, except when I'm out of town and someplace whose wifi isn't email app-friendly, when I use the custom Webmail at my company offered with cPanel.
Ads? What ads?
I love Pegasus Mail. I think it is a fantastic program.
My problem is with David Harris. I have considered supporting him before as anyone who offers up a quality product deserves to be paid for it. Unfortunately, David's a whinging crybaby. Over the past decade he has offered upgrades at a pitiful pace, which is bad enough, but then goes on to cry about not "getting paid enough for it". His recent letter, detailing how he would like 1,000 supporters a _year_ EACH donating $50 USD just to continue development without detailing any sort of roadmap or release timetable is ABSOLUTELY LUDICROUS. A request for a guaranteed income without a guaranteed delivery of a product is easily one of the most arrogant things I've ever heard of from an independent software developer. The fact that Pegasus Mail has remained largely unchanged (except under the hood) for the past decade further adds to David's arrogance. Add in that he has spent the last couple of years rewriting Pegasus Mail's core code because he hasn't kept up with modern techniques and compilers and it all comes off as a guy who wants to get paid NOW what he didn't in his glory days.
My heart goes out to him in many ways, though. It's hard to be a lone Shakespeare making a living off your work when you have a million monkeys with typewriters trying to replicate what you've done and give it away for free. I wholeheartedly agree with his thoughts on open source and am very glad he has not released his code for free. Unfortunately, instead of manning up for the hard sell and convincing us all that his product is worth it, that he's deeply invested in its future and that he cares about us - the end user - he's chosen to throw himself a giant pity party.
If Pegasus Mail 5.0 comes out before the end of this year then I'll join his "Pegasus Mail 1,000" and send him $50. If not, he'll never get a dime from me and, I suspect, many, many, many people who have grown tired of his charades. You want to get paid $70,000 NZD a year SOLELY to develop Pegasus Mail then you had damn well better develop it and communicate with your NOW _PAYING_ CUSTOMERS.
I find that Opera's "database with lots of views" method of storing email is perfect for my combination of masses of important mail and poor memory. I can find messages in many different ways with ease :) As well as the excellent pre-indexed search, I can view messages by author/recipient, email account, by attachment type, by labels, or by custom filters (including regexp functions). A single message can appear in any number of these different types of list simultaneously :)
I'm very surprised that no-one else has copied Opera in this idea, and that people still like to file messages into folders like they would with a paper letter - one folder per message (perhaps with manually-applied tags to help). This restricts you to two methods of finding it: remembering which folder, and search.
Opera is great for managing e-mail and like the rest of the browser it doesn't use much memory. It's IMAP handling encouraged me to move all of my accounts to IMAP but always use the Opera full-text search. Filtering needs improving for ease of use - you need to know how handle RegExs too soon, being able to use different personalities on the same account (even it's just signatures) and PGP support and integration with the OS address book would make it the dog's bollocks.
Thunderbird for work email (since the Lotus Notes based web version is horrendous and only used in emergencies when there is no other alternative).
Web mail for non-work, private email. More than good enough, has filters, etc. And the FaceSpace et al. stuff gets forwarded there anyway.
The students have all been moved to a GMail based email here now, but staff and faculty will never be. Legal reasons, confidential stuff, dammit... If companies do it why couldn't the university?
Old, abandoned and has a few bugs, but this is what my wife uses for one important feature. It lets you review the headers before downloading the mail, and mark most of them to be deleted BEFORE download. Thunderbird is supposed to have something like this but it doesn't work the same way, and anyhow, the time is long past for my wife to learn to use a new program. Phoenix is in her long term memory.
I review emails by webmail, then download the ones I want to keep with Thunderbird after deleting the junk. Why is this important? Not everyone has high speed landline broadband. When family members send me a 5Mb snap of whatever, that gets deleted unseen too.
In the old, old days, the only email client was system supplied, whether it was a user hostile thing layered over EMACS, such as was on the System360 in the late '80s (the program's name has been blotted from memory but the terminal client of choice was Kermit), or a BOFH inspired tendency to delete anything it regarded as too old (pine on HP-UX in the same era). There wasn't a choice of email client as such, just a set of step for downloading the text files.
The in the merely old days, along comes commercial ISPs, and you use a client because you want to receive email, not just have an address. Then usable web clients began to appear, and you still needed an email client to download and archive.
Today, unlimited storage is the norm and, for the casual user, there's just no compelling reason to have a stand alone client, until something terrible happens and all their data goes poof.
Where the icon for nostalgic reminiscings?
I can't believe how little love there is on here for webmail. Access all your email and contacts from any Internet connected computer, don't worry about backups or changing computers. what is there not to like about that?
I use gmail together with my own domain name, I just can't see why I'd ever go back to an email client.
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