A personal exploration of the state of email clients by Michael McCracken.
I'm looking for the FedEx of email.
Keep track using twitter: @mikechecksmail
This was an interesting experiment, but I don’t have the time or energy to keep up a blog about email clients. I’m not a journalist - so instead I’m going to keep occasionally posting about email and everything else at my old personal blog: http://michael-mccracken.net/.
I don’t post that often about anything, but if you really only care about what I have to say about email, give this link a try: http://michael-mccracken.net/tag/email/.
See you over there!
The start of a 3-part series on GMail from Adam Engst. He was a long-time Eudora user, so it’s interesting to see how his workflow changed when he moved to such a different program.
Also, as a journalist I’m sure he gets tons more email than average people, and he can’t afford to just ignore it.
MailPerspectives is a new plugin from indev software for Apple Mail. It adds new window styles that are more compact than the standard Mail window, with improved keyboard navigation to process your messages more quickly.
Take a look at the interactive HTML virtual tour - probably the best app-marketing scheme I’ve seen, because it’s more informative than a screenshot but less intrusive than a screencast…
It’s beginning to feel like a golden age for mac email clients.
Missed this until Michael Tsai mentioned it in the latest Release Notes for SpamSieve - if MailMate works for me on 10.5, I’ll give a review here.
Apparently, it’s been in beta for over a year. Not sure how I missed it.
Maybe I should’ve called this “Mike Checks Out”. I’ve decided I’m going to be less ambitious about big posts here and just post small things as they come. Hopefully that’ll be interesting.
I think the less an email application does the better — feature-rich ones only encourage users to move in. I’d rather spend my time somewhere else.
I might be the only person who ever thought to complain that the key shortcut for “Send this message” is different across mail clients - I guess most people only use one.
But even before I started this project I was using multiple clients at once, to separate “work” email from “home” email in a way that was easy to control where the files go. (No work email backed up to home server, etc.) So I have noticed quite the set of key shortcuts:
⌘⇧D
^x
y to answer the prompt, so I usually think of this as an Emacs-y ^xy⌘E
⌘↵
⌘⇧D
⌘⇧D is the Mac standard. I’d have to agree. ⌘↵ seems weird to me.⌘↵
tab-enter. It’s really just saying to use the keyboard navigation features to press the button, which also works for me on Safari. It’s not really an obvious shortcut, but it works well enough.* Of course sending should (must!) be undo-able, but that’s a discussion for another day…
A nice detailed description of the updates to MobileMe’s webmail client from Dave Caolo at his new blog, 52tiger.
I haven’t used MobileMe mail for several years, mostly because the couple hundred dollars I spent on .Mac without ever really getting much use out of it, before finally canceling it far too late, still kind of stings.
How well does GMail let me create filters to handle heavy traffic lists?
GMail is not perfect, but it’s got the workflow down right. When I want to add a filter, I am probably looking at a message that I want the filter to match. So GMail’s “Filter messages like this” command is a great match. They also know about lists, and they auto-populate the search command for the filter with the “list:list@foo.com” style search. This works out pretty great, and I’ve been using GMail for lists for years.
It works to divert the flood out of my inbox, but it can also mean that for lists that aren’t related to my job, I have basically unsubscribed to the list - out of sight, out of mind. I sometimes add filters to automatically “star” conversations I’m likely to want to look at, but that’s not the best choice - it overloads the meaning of the star, and I’d rather see either tags that aren’t full labels (and don’t clutter up my label list) or a some other flag-like bit that is only set by filters to say when something might be interesting.
