Comments on: Why Email Clients Need to Change

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 03:06:00 +0000

Finch,
You’re right: gmail/hotmail/yahoo accounts scream “SOHO/consultant/personal.” I love startups, but unless you are an individual “building the brand of you” (sooo FastCompany circa 2001), having a branded domain email account is a requirement. Fair? Maybe not. True? Yep.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:58:54 +0000

I agree. You sound like you use some form of GTD. Works for me: clean inbox, etc.

By: Emma

Emma — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:52:25 +0000

Great insights. The way we use email is evolving -has evolved – and the big players out there – outlook, thunderbird, even gmail – haven’t quite figured out how to grow with us.
Rather than deal with a lot of small apps/plug-ins, I think Postbox – new client based on Thunderbird – offers the right kind of holistic solution – with search for example, tagging, and multiple mailbox management. I’ve been using it for at least 7 months and it’s been doing well keeping up with my business/life.

http://www.postbox-inc.com

By: Aaron Johnson – Links: 6-3-2009

Aaron Johnson – Links: 6-3-2009 — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:47:53 +0000

[...] Why Email Clients Need to Change Quote: ".. But if inboxes don’t fundamentally change in order to adapt to their new role as the keeper of myriad transactions across the entire web, they’ll be obsolete." (categories: email data ideas inbox filtering communication ) [...]

By: Gerry Novak

Gerry Novak — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:32:30 +0000

And my e-mail Magazine subscriptions should all be saved to a seperate PST/offline file. When I search my emails for Symantec, I want to ONLY find correspondance to/from them, NOT every article that mentions them. (I have a rule in outlook that does this now, but only after years of frustration of keeping ALL of my old e-mails in the same file, making a nightmare of searching for things like Symantec +License +Key)

By: RSS readers modeled after email clients are fundamentally broken - News ums Netz

RSS readers modeled after email clients are fundamentally broken - News ums Netz — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:59:29 +0000

[...] Given that a significant percentage of the time, the stuff in my email inbox is messages that were sent directly to me that need some form of response or acknowledgment this model is somewhat sound although as many have pointed out there is a lot of room for improvement. [...]

By: Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - RSS readers modeled after email clients are fundamentally broken

Tue, 05 May 2009 12:17:34 +0000

By: Leslie Poston

Leslie Poston — Sun, 03 May 2009 03:09:50 +0000

I love all of your ideas for the perfect email client, but man I hope it looks and acts nothing like Gmail. I can’t stand Gmail. I refuse to use it unless forced by the need to share a Google Doc or some such and forward all mail OUT of it to Thunderbird.

By: Sarvesh

Sarvesh — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:59:09 +0000

Hey Alex,

I’ve sent you a linked in invite with my email id.

Thanks,
Sarvesh

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:32:49 +0000

Alistair,

Your breakdown of activity offers great insight. You should take a look at NutshellMail to help remove your Twitter and Facebook notification clutter. With NutshellMail, you can disable your one-off notifications and instead receive consolidated updates of all your activity on a schedule you choose. I get my updates every three hours and they provide a snapshot of all my Twitter activity, including new followers, quitters, direct messages, @replies, (search term tracking coming soon). The best part is that NutshellMail lets you update your status, send dms, retweets, replies as well as follow and unfollow commands via email. The Facebook feature updates you on new messages, friend requests, birthdays, invites and status updates from your friends. It also lets you update your status via email and will soon enable you to reply to friends comments via email.

NutshellMail is free and you can learn more at http://nutshellmail.com.

I am one of the co-founders and would be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Cheers,
Mark

By: Darren

Darren — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:35:27 +0000

Great article, truly love you ideas. I hope someone actually takes notice and follows through.

By: Pariah Burke

Pariah Burke — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:41:04 +0000

“Identity 2.0″ is a perfect way to put it, though “Identity 1.0″ has yet to come out of beta–to wit: lifestreaming services like Chi.mp, Retaggr, and so on.

Given the depth and breadth of this discussion, there are obvious needs here waiting to be filled. An entrpreneur would be wise to take this entire discussion (including the original post, of course) as a feature list for a new application.

By: John Engler

John Engler — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:42:35 +0000

You need an OtherInbox for all that “other crap”.

http://www.OtherInbox.com/

By: Alex Bowyer

Alex Bowyer — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:10:10 +0000

@jonands73 Doesn’t that depend on how you want to use the web? If you’re happy to go to multiple places: your e-mail inbox, your Twitter page, your Facebook inbox, your RSS reader (we can now add to this list your OtherInbox inbox) and so on, then sure, you may not need notifications..

But if your e-mail is the one thing you check regularly wouldn’t it be nice to have it as your communications central – the only place you have to check for all your communications? I think that is why some people prefer to use notifications. The problem Alistair was talking about is not “I have too many notifications” but rather that the notifications that come in, which we do need in this usage, comes in as if it were *just another e-mail*, whereas it needs special treatment.

@andreas.wpv explained the idea of a communications central very clearly in his post http://andreas-wpv.blogspot.com/2009/02/does-facebook-privacy-and-copyright.html

By: Alex Bowyer

Alex Bowyer — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:56:51 +0000

Hi, I am working on this research with Alistair at Bitcurrent.

Great to see that there are so many tools out there already working on this problem.

We’re looking at doing a round-up post of the space including all the services & tools we’ve found already as well as those in these comments – GTDInbox, Postbox, cc.betty, OtherInbox, Mail Trends, Xobni, Xoopit are the ones in the list so far.

If there are any more we’ve missed, or you can point us to demos or other materials that would be helpful, please let me know, alex at bitcurrent dot com.

@Sarvesh we’d be interested in looking at frothmail but can’t find your contact details. Please get in touch.

Thanks
Alex

By: Stephen

Stephen — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:05:48 +0000

I like Outlook, as a suite. my Company forces me to use Lotus Notes on my work computer I transfer everything I can to personal Outlook, it has a superior Calendar, and the address book and journaling are great, the e-mail client might be weak, but in the grand scheme of usage e-mail is only a portion of what Outlook can be used for. I am glad Xobni chose outlook and not the likes of Thunder Bird or other.