Martin, > I agree with you that it is not necessarily a function of an e-mail > program. But why do you think many e-mail clients are not > successfull anymore? I guess because the people see that integrated > functions offer more values.
A number of reasons, not the least of which is that new users (young people) in this part of the world, at least, seem to prefer web based email. Very few features, they simply want to deal with a few emails a week with no fuss. Remembering the Mulberry email client that added support for calendaring as you suggest as a last ditch effort. Not long after Mulberry went bankrupt. No, this kind of thing is not a great source of new users, which is not the same thing as making current users happy. > I use a separate news client. When I want to send mails it always is a > little bit messy - and more when you have to use more than one > e-mail-client on a computer. So I manually have to copy paste to send > a mail from news. What happens when there is an attachment. Okay, I > have to save it and add it. Not very nice. The thing that people forget sometimes, I think, is that things like newsgroup clients require years of development to do well. A half way nntp client tacked onto an email client will not be any more satisfying than a half way email client tacked onto an nntp client. There are a number of these choices available. If you want a half way nntp client, look at Pocomail or Gemini. If you want a half way email client, look at Fore's Agent. Agent's implementation is instructive of the problem involved in uniting nntp with pop. Agent does have email filters, but they were obviously designed for newsgroups. Nntp and pop need different treatments in a number of ways to give users a feeling of being able to do the things they need to do with the type of information they are trying to manage. I suspect, there are very few users casual enough to be satisfied with half way pop or nntp if they are going to use either at all. > The same for RSS feeds. I use "Great News" which is working fine for > me. However I can't store it in the same place like mails. When doing > some search you can file articles in special folders like mails you > got for the search... So, basically I think that this functionality > should come closer together. As a practical matter, this is a very difficult request. So far, nobody has managed to put together a really workable union. Not to mention that you want not only two unions, but three. TB's copyright statement says that TB has been in development for 10 years. This is probably about average for many of the clients out there. TB's email could work better, but in comparison to other offerings, it looks pretty good. Are you willing to give Rit 10 years for nntp, and then another 10 for RSS? Is anybody? > That's true. However the success of Rit is when they have satisfied > users. Not current users. Long term viability depends on attracting new users. These two groups are very different in what they think they want. > And there is another point: when they put more new functions - I think > the (IMHO) stupid discussion of a free upgrade is gone. Rit can do a paid upgrade once in a while, and have done. It is no substitute for attracting new users. The one client that seems to be expanding its userbase these days is Thunderbird. To me it looks like it is 4 or 5 years behind the mature clients that are available. What is it that Thunderbird is doing right that the others are not? I confess that I am not able to see it. -- Gleason Using 3.99.24 on Windows XP, 5.1, Build 2600. IMAP email provider is Fastmail, which uses Cyrus server software. ________________________________________________________ Current beta is 3.99.24 | 'Using TBBETA' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
