-Should an email client have a philosophy? I think so. For many people,
-email is our primary means of communication. Something so important
-ought to warrant a little thought.
+Should an email client have a philosophy? For many people, email is
+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.
-So here's Sup's philosophy.
+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 350 megs and Mutt sits there for 60 seconds while it opens
-it. Keeping up with the all the new traffic is painful, even with
+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 impossible, even with
Mutt's excellent threading features, simply because there's so much of
-it---a single thread can span several pages, and God help you if you
-lag behind. And Mutt is probably the best email client out there in
-terms of threading and mailing list support. God help me if I try and
-throw Thunderbird at that.
+it. A single thread can span several pages in the folder index view
+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
-individual pieces of email, and place a high mental cost on the user
+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?
-
-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
+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.
-As a long-time Mutt user, when I first watched people use GMail, I saw
-them use email differently from how I had ever used it. I saw that
-making certain operations quantitatively easier (namely, search)
-resulted in a qualitative difference in usage: you don't have to worry
-about filing correctly, because you can always find things later by
-search. And I saw that thread-centrism had many advantages over
-message-centrism when message volume was high.
+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.
+
+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
+actually better than everything else out there. At least, that's how I
+imagine in happened. Maybe they knew what they were doing from the
+start.
-So, in many ways, I believe GMail has taken the right approach to
-handle both of the factors above, and much of the inspiration for Sup
-was based on GMail. 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 can we build an email client on top of one?) and
-managed to build something that was actually better than everything
-else out there. But ultimately, GMail wasn't right for me (see FAQ),
-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 more or less stole
-directly from GMail:
+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.
+- An immediately accessible and fast search capability over the entire
+ email archive eliminates most of the need for folders, and most of
+ the necessity of deleting email.
-- Labels eliminate what little need for folders that search doesn't
- eliminate.
+- Labels eliminate what little need for folders search doesn't cover.
- A thread-centric approach to the UI is much more in line with how
people operate than dealing with individual messages is. In the vast
Sup is also based on many ideas from mutt and Emacs and vi, having to
do with the fantastic productivity of a console- and keyboard-based
application, the usefulness of multiple buffers, the necessity of
-handling multiple email accounts, etc.
+handling multiple email accounts, etc. But those are just details!
-Give it a go and let me know what you think.
+Try it and let me know what you think.