[jqpabc123]

How to create one super successful email client.

- Support IMAP IDLE

- Support all the major business platforms: Web, Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.

- Support email encryption on a one off basis as needed. Nothing fancy just encrypt the email with AES256. Don't worry I'll get the key to the reipient.

Why this would be super successful.

1) It would eliminate instant messaging for most business use.

2) Consistency, simplicity and ease of support.

3) Contrary to popular opinion, 99 percent of business communication is not super secret stuff. It doesn't warrant the complexity of full time end to end encryption. But it is nice to bave it readily available for the 1 percent where it is really needed.

And yes, I have used K9 personally and I will support it but it doesn't begin to meet my business needs.

[cketti]

Probably not the right app for your use cases, but check out Delta Chat for an example of how unobtrusive email encryption can be:

https://delta.chat/

[jqpabc123]

Delta Chat has a lot of good stuff.

What I need and what I think most businesses need is Delta Email instead of Delta Chat.

[rakoo]

I think business doesn't actually want Email, it wants NNTP. The semantics are different enough that both models have a reason to exist and complement each other:

- With email you write to a specific address. With NNTP you write to a group. In a business you almost always want to target multiple people, because activity is interesting (and relevant) to many people.

- To solve that we have a hack that is mailing lists; they work, but still only allow people to receive content _if they were in the recipient list from the beginning_. With NNTP the actual users are abstracted from the recipient, which allows people to read content in a group _even in the past_, or unsubscribe from a group and not bo bothered by new content

- Because it is ingrained in the protocol, creating/modifying/removing groups is easy to do, contrary to mailing lists. You don't need a special team to do that. Many times there is some content that needs to include multiple lists, but not everyone in those groups is relevant to the discussion... but you still include the different maliing lists because "that's the people who _might_ be interested". No more CC forwarding ad nauseam.

- Side-effect of having well-defined groups: because groups are more fluid they match better to actual people, and so the groups becomes a good denominator of what the "mail" might be about and whether it is important or not (compared to a sender and 189 random recipients)

Just look at the way the latest business IMs like Teams are working. They might not be perfect but they map much more to NNTP semantics, and have become the preferred way to communicate, even in long-ish form, rather than email.

(They do have one big advantage over NNTP though: message editing)

At this point, if a new software is needed anyway, we might as well ditch email and use a better protocol (even if it is not NNTP)

[jqpabc123]

I think business doesn't actually want Email, it wants NNTP

Or how about just an email client with better support for mailing lists?

The SMTP protocol supports multiple recipients adequately enough --- it's the client software that could stand some improvement to make it easier to apply/use.

[rakoo]

I thought it would be sufficiently explained in my message. Mailing lists don't fix that because there's no standardized protocl for creating, modifying and removing them. Moreover even if there was, if a user isn't part of the mailing list but wants to see some message someone needs to forward it. If a message was sent before you joined, too bad, you can't see it.

Everything is just a very clunky experience made with ducktape and handmade scripts for something that can't even do all we want. It's totally normal that people flocked to other solutions.

[folmar]

Message editing is supported over NNTP with Supersedes: header.

[rakoo]

That is amazing, I never knew about that. We should have standardized it for email as well.

[pabs3]

I think support for IMAP NOTIFY scales better, since it is per-connection instead of per-folder.

[jqpabc123]

IDLE and NOTIFY kinda work together don`t they? In any case, all I really need is "instant" notification of new messages.

[tlamponi]

FYI, two points from the Roadmap from the linked website:

> IMAP IDLE – This is the last big item blocking the release of a new stable version.

> Integrate Autocrypt support

[jqpabc123]

Yes, and these are welcome improvements.

Unfortunately, they only apply to Android with K9.

K9 would be much more popular if businesses could simply tell employees, "Use K9 for mail" or even "Use K9 for mobile email".

[richardwhiuk]

You can't do IMAP on iOS in the background.

[jqpabc123]

Apple's inadequacy doesn't have to be universally applied.

[scintill76]

The Mail app has an IMAP extension that allows doing this over push notifications. https://github.com/freswa/dovecot-xaps-daemon