from Hacker News

What do you hate about email?

by RomaTesla on 11/20/19, 8:56 PM with 12 comments

Hello everyone, We're redesigning email from the ground up. Giving it a whole new look. A breath of fresh air. Soooo... we'd love to know about your experience with email. Do you have any wishes or requests?

Appreciate your time! Have a nice rest of the day ;)

  • by brigandish on 11/22/19, 9:42 AM

    The ability to encrypt messages that's easy enough that non tech professionals can use it - or even tech professionals.

    I'd like to be able to read mails simply by sorting them into filesystem folders and reading them like text files. The need to understand mbox and mdir and emix or whatever other formats are out there is annoying. I want to be able to read them with or without an app, and for different apps to read from the same data without reorganising it. Why should I have 3 different stores of the same emails on my laptop because I installed 3 different mail clients?

    If you're really coming up with a whole new system then clarify your terms - what's the different between an MTA or and MRU or an MDA… I remember physics lectures easier than this.

    I could go on all day. Good luck, I genuinely hope you manage it.

  • by ddingus on 11/20/19, 9:03 PM

    Don't pull a google and make email dynamic. The stable nature of it when received is the best feature.

    I like email. It just works. Lean UI would be nice. Top functions one touch or click please.

  • by zlynx on 11/20/19, 9:38 PM

    I like Thunderbird and Mutt.

    If your system can't handle and categorize IMAP folders of 50,000 messages and 500 new emails per day, don't bother on my account.

    Have good GPG support.

    Search is important. My cyrus imap server can find good search results in a couple of seconds out of 15 GB of email. You'd have to at least match that.

    Make sure I can send messages in plain text with formatting that is exactly how I wrote it or pasted it.

    But on the other hand, I do need to be able to read HTML email. I just won't write it.

  • by rman666 on 11/20/19, 9:28 PM

    You’re not really redesigning email. You’re only designing a new email client. Good luck with your project, there have been many email clients over the years, so I’m not sure what you can improve that hasn’t already been tried. Gmail and Outlook, for example, are already very good at what they do.

  • by chewz on 11/20/19, 9:18 PM

    > We're redesigning email from the ground up. Giving it a whole new look. A breath of fresh air.

    It already had been done []

    [] http://mutt.org/