[aboardRat4]

Self-ejecting panels on three sides of the website are a horrible user experience.

Other than that...

The most important thing is not the protocol, it's the gui.

At the moment email's gui is horrible on all platforms without exception.

If/when a decent gui appears, protocols will follow.

Also, JMAP did reading can probably be just WebDAV?

[andros]

GUIs cannot be built either before or during the specification of a protocol. In fact, this is the part that should have the least weight. There are important steps, such as system auditing or making design decisions (like certificate rotation), that are not addressed. However, the goal is not to replace SMTP/IMAP, but rather to show how modern tools, when properly assembled, can replace older protocols with serious design flaws. JMAP is flexible, mature, and easy to connect with current technologies. It's a better option.

[inigyou]

You have two systems.

One has awesome certificate rotation and crap UI.

One has crap certificate rotation and awesome UI.

Which one will take over the world, and which one will only ever have 10 users?

[andros]

It's a false dichotomy; neither can survive in the long run. It's like asking yourself: would you prefer a car with a good engine but a bad steering wheel, or a car with good handling but a bad engine?

[inigyou]

More people drive Toyotas than Ferraris.

[marssaxman]

> At the moment email's gui is horrible on all platforms without exception.

This is obviously a matter of opinion. Of course there are endless different email GUIs, on all the platforms; if you don't like one, there are many alternatives.

I cannot imagine that a "decent GUI" by modern web-development standards could be anything I'd prefer to what already exists. Email works and generally doesn't let designer ego get in the way.

[aboardRat4]

Which email gui supports managesieve?

[isaachinman]

Can you provide more feedback? What do you hate so much about current GUIs? (Working in this exact space)

[aboardRat4]

None of them have good (or any) support for managesieve.

Without managesieve (or some other autotagging mechanism), email is just a big pile of junk.

Even Gmail doesn't support editing filters on the mobile app. It's ludicrous in 2026. And their filters are strictly weaker than Sieve.

None of them have a feature to "quickly generate a filter rule from a message".

None of them have a way to generate a forum-like interface from a mailing list more or less automatically.

None of them (except deltachat, I think), support displaying messages linearly, one below another, rather than one at a time.

One at a time is also important. When I'm writing to my boss, I am writing a message as if it is a document. But when I'm writing to my girlfriend, I often want it to a be a one-line response.

Overquotting is badly managed. Gmail hides the previous message under a button, which is super slow, but most of the time overquotting is not even needed. There should be a button to "not quote" and "strip quotes automatically".

[isaachinman]

Will fast track these requests on Marco.

[dewey]

> At the moment email's gui is horrible on all platforms without exception.

How can you say that when it's one of the benefits of email that it's an open protocol and there's thousands of different apps built on top of it. Terminal UIs, web interfaces, chat interfaces etc. - that should be one of the cases where there's a GUI for anyone.

[inigyou]

And they all suck

[andros]

Why do you find the panel experience so bad?

[aboardRat4]

They flicker in front of my eyes, distract me from reading, and are easy to misclick.

Generally, there is zero reasons to add moving elements to a page.

[flexagoon]

It's very annoying on mobile, covering half of the page all the time

[andros]

When you scroll down, they should all disappear. Do you have JavaScript disabled? What browser and device are you using?

[zahlman]

FWIW, I'm on desktop but I do have JS disabled (more precisely, I use NoScript).

This results in the top and left-side bars staying decorative and unobtrusive, but the concurrent visitor counter thingy is floating well above the bottom-right of the page. But then, as I shrink in the page width, the left-side bar and the concurrent visitor counter swap sides, and also a bunch of the content from the top is added to a new bar at the bottom. Eventually, the horizontal space between the side components becomes irrelevant such that they function as an additional bottom bar. At which point, maybe 40% of the vertical space is used for navigation and other shiny toys. This is really annoying, and the overall experience is inconsistent across widths.

(Also, at all widths, the top-bar has a transparent background, so main page text interferes with top-bar text as it scrolls.)

All of this is done in CSS, so presumably it can be fixed that way too.

[andros]

If you want to eliminate any friction, I recommend enabling JavaScript. Otherwise, you can read it in terminal mode with: curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" [URL]

[dredmorbius]

The panels keep pushing back into the screen on Mobile.

I quickly resorted to Reader View (Firefox/Android).

Remove those, or stuff them below the article.

[andros]

The mobile interaction is similar; it's not a bug, it's by design. If you were able to read the article without any problems, I'm satisfied. Thanks for the feedback.

[dredmorbius]

That was on mobile.

If that's intent, the result is highly aggravating.

[flexagoon]

Yes, but when I stop scrolling and scroll up even a little bit (by accident, or because I want to scroll up and read something I missed) they appear again. I think the only good UX possible is to have a button to show/hide them instead.

[andros]

I'm sorry, but I disagree. The lowest interaction cost is scrolling; it's a natural, continuous, and almost involuntary gesture. Having to click or tap a button requires the user to stop, evaluate whether the title interests them, and decide to make the effort to tap. The interactions you're describing are intentional and measured. I'm sorry but if the content is truly all you care about, I recommend the previous option or activating your browser's reading mode.

[flexagoon]

> almost involuntary gesture

Exactly, which is why attaching large UI shifts to that involuntary gesture makes the experience feel very unpredictable

> activating your browser's reading mode

Reading mode is a hack that's only needed because sites aren't already readable. You shouldn't have to activate it to be able to read the content.

In addition, it doesn't always work well if the website didn't test it. On your website, for example, it removes all images from the text.

> Having to click or tap a button requires the user to stop, evaluate whether the title interests them

Purposefully doing things in a way that doesn't let the user decide if they want it is called a dark pattern. Its not far from those checkboxes that try to trick you into accepting marketing newsletters. "We can't give users an option to think if they want our emails! If they don't, why don't they just use their email's spam filtering?"

You may not see it like that yourself, but huge links to your CV, talks and courses are exactly that - an ad that covers half the screen.

You have multiple people telling you the experience is bad, and you asked for why, but when people give you the explanation you argue back. That's fine of course, it's your own site and you can do whatever you like with it without trying to suit anyone. But that doesn't make the reader experience less bad.