Ask HN: What are you missing in existing email clients?

[rasmusei]

I'm wondering both about features and quality. Personally, I dislike most of the desktop clients not for a lack of features, but for a lack of quality. Too often, UIs are clunky, or IMAP syncing doesn't work well, or search is dissatisfactory.

I should not be priming you more, but just ask: What features and qualities are you missing? What would make you try another client? What are absolute must-haves in terms of features?

[Nadya]

Folders that display their subfolders content. This problem is very inherently noticeable in Outlook while at work. There are 5 types of problems sent to 1 team distro. I filter these 5 types of problems, based on the Subject field, to a different subfolder of the team distro folder. When I view the team distro folder - I don't see any email. I need to click into the individual subfolders. If I create a Search Folder (which will let me see all search results from these 5 folders, effectively being what I want) it needs to be a Top Level folder and cannot, itself, be a Subfolder or reorganized. It will live under the Search Folders menu effectively thwarting my attempts at organization.

I would like to only be notified of new email that enters specific folders - rather than just an on/off where I am spammed with dozens if not hundreds of desktop notifications I do not care for. This way I don't need to keep my email always-visible to see when I get important email.

I would like extremely flexible organizational rules, again similar to Outlook.

All in a UI that gets out of my way and works well in portrait mode, as the few emails I get tend to be more longform and I like to reduce scrolling. I actually like Mailbird's [0] UI because I prefer icons over text labels for a tool I'm using frequently. Terrible UX (what do all these icons mean?) is something I'm willing to overcome as a power user. Using email/webmail clients reminds me of using IE6 with several toolbars installed to the point where I see more of IE's UI than I do the webpage I'm trying to browse. When I read emails I feel like I see more email client than I do email and that's aggravating.

[0] https://www.getmailbird.com

[rasmusei]

Thanks for the detailed reply.

I sort of understand the design decision in Outlook to make the search folders a separate (and flat?) tree. What behavior would you expect from operations like copy, search if you put a search folder inside another (physical) folder? Anyway, I'm sure there are sensible ways to do what you're asking for, but it opens up questions about what a "folder" is and should be. Very interesting.

Notification settings agreed! I always turned all of the notifications off when I had Outlook.

Portrait mode, OK. Many email clients do give some few options for various horizontal/vertical splits. Are the options in Outlook enough in that respect?

[Nadya]

This ended up being quite wordy and I'm still not sure I explained my issue properly. I might need to do a visual mockup of my problem which boils down to "mental disconnect between the source of the data and where you view the data".

I want all Children Folder contents to be visible from a Parent Folder. Actions would still be done to the Child folder the email actually exists inside of - the Parent folder is for presentation purposes only. This is basically how a Search Folder works currently.

Currently if I open up a normal `Parent` folder I will see 0 emails. If I want to see any mail I need to visit a `Parent/Child` folder that the mail is filtered into. But what I really want, sometimes, is to see all of my `Parent/Child` emails in a single, flat view. Folders are great for organizing the past but are really bad for the "now".

To build off my earlier example (re: one distro = five problems) I want to keep these five problems filtered into their own folders for easier organization/finding when other people reference them. However, since I need to solve these problems as they are emailed in I want to watch a `Parent` folder. I can't do this because the `Parent` folder says it has no emails. I can only see email if I look at a `Parent/Child` folder, but now I can't see any email going to the other four `Parent/Child` folders. While watching the `Parent` folder I can see that `Parent/Child` has new unread emails - but now I'm forced to change my folder location panel to the Child folder in order to view and read this unread email. This is different from how a Search Folder works. In a Search Folder, I can continue to see all searched emails while browsing one in the reading panel.

I can see all of them at once by creating a 'Search' folder that searches each `Parent/Child` and displays the result of its search but why can't that Search Folder just be `Parent`? Why does it need to be `/Search Folders/Distro Trasks/`? If `/Parent/` was a search folder that could exist anywhere in the folder tree and works exactly like search folders currently work that'd be perfect.

The TL;DR of the entire problem is that `Parent` should just act like a Search Folder of it's Children instead of being completely useless. I don't want a flat structure - due to organizational/archiving purposes - but I do want a flat structure some of the time for handling email in the present time.

>Portrait mode, OK. Many email clients do give some few options for various horizontal/vertical splits. Are the options in Outlook enough in that respect?

Yes. Existing options that many clients use where the navigation panel and the reading panel are horizontally split instead of vertically split suffice.

[kbenson]

> I want all Children Folder contents to be visible from a Parent Folder. Actions would still be done to the Child folder the email actually exists inside of - the Parent folder is for presentation purposes only. This is basically how a Search Folder works currently.

I seem to remember Thunderbird having saved searches that worked as folders, and they should work in this manner. Does Outlook have a way to save a search like that? It's not ideal, as you have to set it up and it isn't necessarily in the same spot as what it's searching to make it obvious what it is, but it might be better than nothing. If you can't set subfolder display order, creating a saved search of all the relevant subfolders as "0 - Combined View" as a subfolder itself that sorts to the top might get you most the way there.

[Nadya]

Yes, a 'saved search' is a Search Folder.

>it isn't necessarily in the same spot as what it's searching to make it obvious what it is

That's exactly my problem! Search folders are unable to be relocated or act as parent folders.

[sbinthree]

I want webmail that is ruthlessly simple. I don't care about: flags, importance, message status, categories, conversations, etc. Just show me the sender, subject line and date and when I click it, the message. I wish there was more/better scripting / automation tools (ie. if contains "unsubscribe" then archive). Basically I want Gmail but faster load time and better "rules".

[kbenson]

That sounds like most the old webmail clients of yesteryear, except for speed. Squirrelmail was pretty bare bones, but worked. Beating Gmail for speed is going to be hard unless you work with some non-traditional backing storage.

If you really, really want speed, simplicity (beyond initial learning curve at least) and access, getting access to a host that allows shell access, has mutt and screen or tmux installed, and accepts mail delivery would hit all your points as long as a SSH session is doable. Screen/tmux keep the client open when you are disconnected to speed (no need to scan a few hundred MB or couple GB of messages in mbox or Maildir format), and mutt will be as fast and configurable as you can imagine (plus you generally get procmail).

If you're actually interested in that and don't want to run your own mail server, sonic.com (used to be sonic.net) has free shell accounts for customers, and they have non internet services you can sign up for still I think (such as hosting). In any case, you can just call or email support and tell them you are looking for a shell account to read your email and they might hook you up with a shell account for a couple bucks a month.

[rasmusei]

Would you consider a desktop client if it gave you that? I also want simplicity, but synced to my hard drive.

[cimmanom]

I've used Apple's mail.app for over a decade now and don't think anything else matches its handling of multiple accounts (all the other clients I've tried try to keep the accounts too separate). For reference, I've got 8 active accounts at the moment.

Unfortunately, it's increasingly buggy in increasingly problematic ways, and Apple appears to have zero interest in fixing it.

So I'd love to see a client that works like that for multiple accounts (with support for both POP and IMAP) and has all of Apple Mail's features but isn't broken.

The other things I want, but that wouldn't be enough on its own to get me to switch, would be:

1) a way to apply multiple tags to a single message, and filter by tag

2) add private notes to a message or thread

[laumars]

I really hate Electron in general but I've really found an affinity for Mailspring. So much so that I'd actually go as far as saying it's the only email client I've genuinely liked (rather than tolerated). So highly recommend it in spite of the larger footprint it carries compared to fully native.

As an aside note, it supports Gmail and other proprietary cloud mailboxes - if just due to its being Electron based - so theres no more messing about with IMAP et al for Gmail