Hi,
These are the features that I would like to see in my ideal mail client.
*Mail Composition*
* Plain Text Only
I never, ever want to send HTML mail. The default (and, IMHO, only)
method for sending mail should be as plain text. The editor should
provide editing features that facilitate composing and formatting plain
text e-mails.
E-mail should default to sending encoded as UTF-8. There are very few
reasons to ever compose an e-mail and send in any other encoding.
* RFC 2646 Compliance (format=flowed)
For ease of reading by the recipient, the e-mail should adhere to the
requirements in RFC 2646. Spaces should be correctly appended to
wrapped lines, which are wrapped at fewer than 80 characters (72 should
be reasonable, as it allows for some indentation to occur in replies
without exceeding 80 characters too soon). The proper signature
separator should be used ("-- " on its own line), so that mail clients
can properly identify and strip it in replies, as this client should do.
* Inline Replies
The editor should be optimised for proper inline quoting in replies. In
Thunderbird or Postbox (what I currently use), when inserting a response
in the middle of a paragraph, this requires adding moving the cursor to
the desired position and pressing enter a 3 times to get 3 blank lines,
and then moving the cursor back to the middle to start typing. It
irritates me when some people reply and don't leave a blank line before
and after their reply to separate it from the quoted text.
Additionally, depending on where the quote was inserted, it can break
the quotes, which then have to be manually reformatted. To illustrate
this, consider the following example:
---
> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent
> vitae orci nec leo commodo. Laoreet ut ut risus. Pellentesque
> habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac.
---
Say I wanted to insert a reply in the middle of the second line, I would
move the cursor and press enter 3 times. This would result in the
following (the vertical bar represents the cursor):
---
> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent
> vitae orci nec leo commodo.
|
Laoreet ut ut risus. Pellentesque
> habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac.
---
Note how the second half of the quote is now broken, because its first
line is no longer quoted, and the wrapping is all messed up. Ideally,
this mail client should automatically handle reflowing the quote
properly, ensuring that the line is properly quoted. Also, I shouldn't
have to press enter 3 times. Pressing it once should insert the 3 blank
lines and place my cursor in the middle. The result should look like
this and, of course, adhere to RFC 2646:
---
> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent
> vitae orci nec leo commodo.
|
> Laoreet ut ut risus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus
> et netus et malesuada fames ac
---
* Reply to Multiple Emails in One
As I'm on a lot of mailing lists, and often threads can get quite long,
I find it's often appreciated to reduce the number of e-mails sent. One
way to do this is to reply once to a whole group of messages, each
individually quoted and attributed one after the other. This also helps
to avoid repeating yourself, since you're less likely to say the same
thing twice in one e-mail, as you are when responding in separate
e-mails. I've heard Pine supports this sort of functionality, but I've
not used Pine myself.
So, I would like to be able to select a number of messages in a thread,
choose Reply All, and be presented with a composition window that quotes
and attributes each selected e-mail, one after the other. The mail
should be addressed to the mailing list(s), with each of the recipients
BCC'd. (since there's likely to be a lot of people addressed, sending
by BCC should help to keep the reply-to list short.
* Managing CC's in Mailing List Replies
Often, a thread's participant list can grow rapidly, causing CC lists to
become increasingly long. While I think it's reasonable to CC the
people being directly responded to, it's courteous to trim people from
the CC list who aren't. Unfortunately, people often don't, and I still
find myself CC'd in threads I haven't contributed to for a few days.
It would be nice if this mail client could assist with trimming the CC
list in some way, such as offering to trim the CC list to people who
aren't quoted. This may be difficult to achieve, though, and care
should be taken not to inadvertently and unexpectedly remove recipients
that should be addressed.
* Automatic BCC to Self
BCC'ing a copy of the message to myself is a rather useful technique.
It should be possible to have this done automatically any time an e-mail
is sent. The reason this is useful is that it gives gives a clear
indication that the mail was successfully received by SMTP server,
letting me know nothing went wrong, at least up until that point, and it
also gives me a copy of the e-mail that can be archived along with other
mails in the thread.
The one caveat of this is that, although it helps for the first reason,
on mailing lists it can result in duplicate mails: one from the BCC, and
one via the mailing list. Ideally, once the copy has been received via
the mailing list, the BCC'd copy can be deleted. But, occasionally,
something does go wrong with sending to a mailing list and having the
BCC there allows me to resend it later if necessary.
* Easy Signature Management
Sometimes, it's useful to have different signatures for different
purposes. It would be very useful if this mail client could choose an
appropriate signature for me, e.g. based on where I'm sending the mail
or which account it's from, and also make it very easy to switch to an
alternative signature manually if necessary.
e.g. For work reasons, I have to include the company name and URL in
e-mails sent for official company reasons, including to mailing lists.
But for non-work related e-mail, it's often better to just have my name
and personal URL. Though, I often get lazy and forget to change it with
my current mail client.
* Address Book Integration
This must have support for integrating with OS X's Address Book.app
contact list.
* Re:/Fwd: Prefixes (and annoyingly internationalised versions)
Some offending mail clients (Outlook/Entourage, I believe), annoyingly
switch to alternative abbreviations when the user their system
configured with a different language. Firstly, don't do this. Stick
with the conventional Re: and Fwd:, regardless of the platform language.
Secondly, detect the presence of these offending prefixes and replace
them with a single Re: or Fwd: appropriately, at least for the most
common ones. I don't want my mail client to mess up the subject line
with, e.g. "Re: AW: Re: Subject".
*Reading Mail*
* Plain Text Only
Again, I would like to see the plain text alternative by default when I
receive a multi-part e-mail. I really dislike reading HTML mail as much
as I hate sending it. Ideally, when someone omits the plain text
alternative, the e-mail client should automatically convert and render
the HTML variant as if it were plain text.
The default rendering should be a monospace font, such as Monaco.
Please do not use Courier for any purpose.
Also, the rendering should also adhere to RFC 2646 conventions,
especially if the format=flowed parameter was specified.
* Automatically Checking Multiple Folders for New Messages
As I said before, I'm on a lot of mailing lists. I use .procmailrc file
on the server to sort my messages into folders for each mailing list. I
like the ability to have my mail client automatically check each folder
for new messages and notify me when they arrive.
In Thunderbird and Postbox, the only way to do this is to manually
change the properties of each folder and select "Check this folder for
new messages". Setting this up is a very tedious process that I have to
repeat for each new mailing list I subscribe to and create a folder for.
* New Mail Notifications
It should be possible to be notified of new mail by a sound effect, and
have Growl notifications indicate which messages are new. Clicking on
the growl notification should take me directly to that message, ideally
opening it up in a new tab so I'm not taken away from other mails I may
have been in the process of reading.
Postbox currently gets this horribly wrong. Although they brought the
much needed Growl notification support that Thunderbird was lacking, the
implementation of it is broken and not useful. The notification should
tell me all I need to know to either access the mail immediately, or
inform me about it and let me find it later. This should include the
e-mail subject, sender, e-mail account and an indication of the folder
it's located it.
Since I have multiple folders, often with dozens or even hundreds of
unread messages in each, identifying which folder the new mail arrived
in can be difficult.
* Fast and Responsive
Switching between folders should not be a painful process. In
Thunderbird and Postbox, possibly due to the fact that I have thousands
of archived messages, switching to a folder and waiting for it to load
can be painfully slow, while it tries to check for and download new
message headers. This process should happen in the background, and let
me get on with reading the mail that has already been downloaded.
Also, switching tabs or folders should not lose my place in e-mails I
may still be reading.
* Improved Thread View
Also, a proper thread view would be awesome. I absolutely hate the
conversation view that Mail.app and Postbox use, instead of using a
proper hierarchy. I want to be able to see which e-mails are responding
to which, and I want better support for managing long/deep threads.
Thunderbird's thread view doesn't quite cut it, as it will just keep
indenting replies further and further, the deeper down the list they go.
I want to be able to collapse older portions of a thread that I'm not
dealing with any more and focus on the more recent stuff.
With current mail clients, it seems to be an all or nothing deal. I can
expand the thread and have my message list filled up with upwards of
hundreds of old messages, despite only a few being new or sent within
the last day or so. It's the new ones I'm interested in, so some way to
collapse most of the old messages while keeping enough context to
understand where and how the newer messages fit in would be useful. This
would also help when a thread gets too long, if some way is found to
condense it so that the indent doesn't get unmanageable.
* Attachments
Postbox has support for Quick View of attachments. (I suspect Mail.app
might have similar functionality, but I don't use it myself). This is
quite useful for viewing attached PDFs or HTML documents, and it would
be nice if this supported it too.
*Managing Messages*
* Archiving and Sorting
Although I have a lot of filters for mailing lists, I still receive
quite a lot of mail that lands directly in my inbox to be dealt with
manually. I like to keep e-mail organised into categorised folders, to
that, e.g. I have a folder for storing all my mail related to Airlines
(flight bookings, travel itineraries, etc.), another for Finance
(banking, tax, etc.), another for general software issues (like support
requests, etc.) and whole bunch more.
When I send or receive mail, it would be nice if the mail client could
detect where I've filed previous e-mails in this thread, or sent
to/received from the same person or organistion, and then offer to file
that message in the same folder.
* Searching
This should go without saying, but a good quality, fast and effective
search would be very useful, especially when searching through thousands
of messaging. This implies some sort of caching and indexing should be
used to speed things up.
*Offline Support
I want to be able to use my e-mail client offline at any time to read
messages that have already downloaded. I usually have a broadband
connection, and so downloading messages as soon as they're received is
useful. These should be cached and readily accessible at any time,
online or offline. This should then sync up with the server as soon as
I'm back online.
* Marking Messages
I like the ability to mark messages for various reasons. Either to
categorise them or simply highlight for dealing with later. For
example, when I used Thunderbird, I took advantage of the ability to
mark messages as Important, which highlighted their subject lines in red
for me. Sadly, Postbox has broken this functionality and colours are no
longer used. I really would like to have colour coding back, or some
alternative technique the is just as easy or easier to work with.
* Junk Mail Filter and Scam Detection
I have server side filtering using Spam Assassin on my current host, but
it's not perfect and lots of junk still gets through. Postbox and
Thunderbird both have reasonable junk mail filters, though it's far from
perfect, which do quite a good job of catching most of the others. They
also have the ability to mark messages as junk or not junk, to train the
filter. This mail client should ideally have a built in junk mail filter.
--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
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