April 2011
2 posts
Acknowledging the end of 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...
4 tags
Adam Engst on GMail at Tidbits →
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.
March 2011
2 posts
4 tags
MailPerspectives →
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...
2 tags
Quick note: MailMate →
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.
February 2011
2 posts
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.
1 tag
Detailed Usability Review of Thunderbird →
August 2010
1 post
“I think the less an email application does the better — feature-rich ones only...”
– http://nerdgap.com/post/941093776/talking-tools-with-shawn-blanc
June 2010
3 posts
2 tags
Short: Send shortcut
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...
52tiger.net on new MobileMe webmail client →
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.
2 tags
Filters: GMail
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...
May 2010
4 posts
3 tags
Filters: Thunderbird 3
How well does Thunderbird 3 let me create filters to handle heavy traffic lists?
There’s not much support for using a message to build a filter from, which I think is the most natural workflow. The menu item “Tools > Message Filters…” opens a dialog box that could use some simplification. For example, the buttons to move filters up and down in order are unnecessary - you...
2 tags
Dealing with High-traffic Lists and Filters
One thing that can make a big difference in a client is how well it helps you cope with heavy-traffic lists. Sometimes we need to stay on top of a firehose, and a client that helps filter out the noise and lets you keep track of what’s going on in sometimes very long threads is an invaluable tool.
You’ll find plenty of opinions about how to do this, but I think it’s well...
A quick note about Mobile Me Mail beta →
Apple’s Mobile Me mail - a webmail that always struck me as trying too hard to be like a desktop mail client - has been re-designed, and it added two features that I completely agree with in a mail client - widescreen view (a message should be the entire height of a window) and a one-click archive button, to help achieve Inbox Zero as fast as possible.
4 tags
WatchI ran across this video in my bookmarks - this looks like the result of Yahoo acquiring Xoopit. It looks like they’ve got a platform for building “applications” that users can add into their webmail client. (Here’s the developer info )
It’s a little like Facebook’s games and other apps, and I’d be surprised if that’s not what they’re...
April 2010
10 posts
5 tags
New Ideas in Email: Kwaga
Occasionally, I’m going to take a break from nit-picking existing mail clients to point to some interesting new ideas for email. It’ll be focused on ideas you can use soon, that work with existing email standards - I’m going to hold off on talking about Google Wave until I understand what it’s really for.
Today, there’s Kwaga - they have a desktop app that shows you...
Just something I noticed in Postbox just now - when I select a thread, it marks every message as read whether or not it was actually displayed.
This might be going down a rathole here, but I think I’d like read to mean that I’ve had the chance to see it…
I think the important thing here is separating “I’m done with this” from “Read” - which is not the...
6 tags
Conversation View & Keeping up with Lists
Here’s a set of screenshots that show how conversation view can help keeping up with a public list.
I’ve been subscribed to the LLVM-dev mailing list for years in GMail, and for about a week in my mikechecksmail test account. I’m not active in the LLVM project - it’s just something I want to check in on occasionally. (For a while I had a filter that popped up any mention...
3 tags
Public List Tests: The Firehose
I’m signing up for a couple of public mailing lists to test how the clients help me handle the firehose of potentially-relevant emails.
For years now, I’ve used GMail exclusively for public lists, because the conversation view maps really well to how I like to scan most lists - I like to see what new threads have started, and only read individual messages if the topic is interesting....
5 tags
Postbox
I’ve grabbed a copy of Postbox, so I can add it to the list of clients I’m poking around. It’s cross-platform, based on Thunderbird, so it shares a lot of its foundations, such as a tabbed, multi-pane interface. The settings in particular are very similar to Thunderbird 3, with just the occasional tweak.
However, they’ve clearly put a lot of effort into a nice face-lift...
Two way street
Hi - Just a quick note that I added comments to this tumblog, so the six of us can have a nice chat about mail. You can also always trade thoughts with me at mikechecksmail at michael-mccracken.net.
Sincerely,
-mike
6 tags
Mozilla Raindrop
A little while ago I noticed the Mozilla Raindrop project. It’s an interesting project in Mozilla Labs by the Thunderbird team.
It’s trying to rethink how messaging (in general, not just email) should work - using open web technologies. On the surface it sounds like Google Wave, but I’d say it’s aiming a little lower - trying to take existing protocols and build software...
4 tags
Send again
Apple Mail’s “Send again” feature is handy - it takes a message and creates a duplicate of it, ready to either edit or re-send exactly as-is. It’s a bit of a mystery, though, and I bet it isn’t used much.
The problem is that the wording and keyboard shortcut don’t say enough about what’s really about to happen. You could be forgiven for guessing that...
3 tags
http://inessential.com/2004/05/25/rss_router →
Here’s a post from the recesses of memory.
Back in 2004, Brent Simmons said:
… your feedreader, like your browser and email app, is a hub of information. It makes sense to want to route information from the hub to other applications.
This is a great point - and I’d like to expand on it. I think it goes further than just being able to send data from your email client to other...
4 tags
Unread counts
One common misguided feature of mail clients is putting an attention-grabbing red badge somewhere showing the count of unread messages in your inbox (or some other folder).
It’s worst if it’s on the dock badge and you don’t hide the dock - then there’s no way short of quitting the app to completely avoid this visual interruption. Sure you can just ignore it, but why should...
March 2010
5 posts
6 tags
HTML mail is here to stay, so a client needs to handle it well. Since images in HTML mail are security problems, a good client won’t load them until you say so - and should also let you white-list some senders.
GMail does this well enough, with two links - one to show the images in a message once, and another to whitelist the sender. I’d say that’s about the best you can ask...
9 tags
Let’s talk some more email philosophy. An email client should help you quickly get through new emails, on your schedule, and turn them into whatever you need them to be once you’ve read them. Then it should shut up until you call it again.
Again, I’ll point at Merlin Mann as my original inspiration, and if you want to hear more about the reasons behind this line of thought, go...
4 tags
Why mikechecksmail
I think that email clients are important, and worth a little criticism. We all use email, and lots of us complain about it - especially professionals.
It’s such a critical tool for our jobs, and it’s frustrating when it doesn’t work as well as we’d like, or when it distracts too much when we have better things to do.
What’s my philosophy on email? If you want the...
4 tags
http://is.gd/b0K5b →
Merlin has a suggestion about inboxes and default views:
Assuming I want to see unprocessed messages every time I do _anything_ with email is like making me trudge out to my home mailbox every time I take a leak, turn on the oven, fold a towel, or do any of the 500,000 other things I can easily accomplish without asking for new information.
Every mail client ever misses Merlin’s point....
6 tags
Let’s start things off with a key-shortcut gripe from Thunderbird 3.
“Forward” is ⌘-L. Not ⌘-F (that’s find-in-message, which is pretty common, if rarely used) or even ⌘-⇧-F, like it is in Mail. ⌘-⇧-F in Thunderbird brings up this bad boy:
We can talk more about search later, but for for the sake of the keyboard shortcut discussion, why not start with the nice search...