doc/Philosophy.txt (3561B) - raw
1 Should an email client have a philosophy? For many people, email is
2 one of our primary means of communication, and email archives are an
3 integral part of our long-term memory. Something so important ought to
4 warrant a little thought.
5
6 Here's Sup's philosophy.
7
8 Using "traditional" email clients today is increasingly problematic.
9 Anyone who's on a high-traffic mailing list knows this. My ruby-talk
10 folder is 430 megs and Mutt sits there for 60 seconds while it opens
11 it. Keeping up with the all the new traffic is impossible, even with
12 Mutt's excellent threading features, simply because there's so much of
13 it. A single thread can span several pages in the folder index view
14 alone! And Mutt is probably the fastest, most mailing-list aware email
15 client out there. God help me if I try and use Thunderbird.
16
17 The problem with traditional clients like Mutt is that they deal with
18 individual pieces of email. This places a high mental cost on the user
19 for each incoming email, by forcing them to ask: Should I keep this
20 email, or delete it? If I keep it, where should I file it? I've spent
21 the last 10 years of my life laboriously hand-filing every email
22 message I received and feeling a mild sense of panic every time an
23 email was both "from Mom" and "about school". The massive amounts of
24 email that many people receive, and the cheap cost of storage, have
25 made these questions both more costly and less useful to answer.
26
27 Contrast that with using Gmail. As a long-time Mutt user, I was blown
28 away when I first saw someone use Gmail. They treated their email
29 differently from how I ever had. They never filed email and they never
30 deleted it. They relied on an immediate, global, full-text search, and
31 thread-level tagging, to do everything I'd ever done with Mutt, but
32 with a trivial cost to the user at message receipt time.
33
34 From Gmail I learned that making certain operations quantitatively
35 easier (namely, search) resulted in a qualitative improvement in
36 usage. I also learned how thread-centrism was advantageous over
37 message-centrism when message volume was high: most of the time, a
38 message and its context deserve the same treatment. I think it's to
39 the Gmail designers' credit that they started with a somewhat ad-hoc
40 idea (hey, we're really good at search engines, so maybe we can build
41 an email client on top of one) and managed to build something that was
42 actually better than everything else out there. At least, that's how I
43 imagine in happened. Maybe they knew what they were doing from the
44 start.
45
46 Unfortunately, there's a lot to Gmail I can't tolerate (top posting,
47 HTML mail, one-level threads, and ads come to mind, never mind the
48 fact that it's not FOSS). Thus Sup was born.
49
50 Sup is based on the following principles, which I stole directly from
51 Gmail:
52
53 - An immediately accessible and fast search capability over the entire
54 email archive eliminates most of the need for folders, and most of
55 the necessity of deleting email.
56
57 - Labels eliminate what little need for folders search doesn't cover.
58
59 - A thread-centric approach to the UI is much more in line with how
60 people operate than dealing with individual messages is. In the vast
61 majority of cases, a message and its context should be subject to
62 the same treatment.
63
64 Sup is also based on many ideas from mutt and Emacs and vi, having to
65 do with the fantastic productivity of a console- and keyboard-based
66 application, the usefulness of multiple buffers, the necessity of
67 handling multiple email accounts, etc. But those are just details!
68
69 Try it and let me know what you think.