E-Mail Client

It seems every E-Mail client I use, leaves me wanting more out of it than it's willing to give, or is just too much of a hassle to get it to work the way I want. Sure you can add extensions/plugins. But sometimes, the things I want to do can only be done very hackily, and break easy. Thus, John Bailey and myself brainstormed a bit, and came up with the following.

Treat messages as trees, with each paragraph as a child.

When replying, deleting a paragraph node would insert a "<snip/>" tag that would automatically condense if more than one are next to each other. The user could right-click on a paragraph node to reply directly to that paragraph, or "mark for reply" to reply to multiple paragraph nodes at once.

Built in support for "Reply to list"

Having to hit "reply to all" and then remove everyone except the list is tedious. There are extensions out there to implement this, but for us, this is a basic feature and should be in the client itself.

Built in pgp/gpg support

This is another one of those features that we believe should be in the client by default and not "tacked on later".

Webkit for HTML support

While I can't stand HTML emails, using webkit for it is just a no brainer. Aside from that, depending on how we implement the actual composition and view windows, we could do it in HTML as well, and this just makes it easier.

Thread navigation for non-threaded views

Pressing tab in view mode should move to the next reply in the current thread first, then move to a new thread, regardless of whether you're viewing threaded or unthreaded.

Merge compose and view windows together

The idea here is to simplify the user interface. Basically when you're viewing an email you should be able to reply directly to it rather than having to open another window. We would have to make input obvious by adding a paragraph node, possibly with a border and focus.

Allow viewing just subtrees

John Bailey: allow multiple tabs/windows/frames/something to each focus on individual subtrees of the folder structure

Gary Kramlich: wtf does that mean?

John Bailey: say you have:

/
/Pidgin
/Pidgin/blah
/Guifications
/Guifications/blah

John Bailey: allow a second window to look at only /Pidgin or /Guifications

John Bailey: (note I never said this was a good idea, just that it was an idea, period)

Gary Kramlich: sort of like a file manager?

John Bailey: yeah, kinda

John Bailey: the idea here is that you can "jail" a tab to a particular section of the folder tree. By having views for specific portions of the tree, they can be collapsed by default in the view of /, which allows you to see more of your folder structure without scrolling or missing that you have unread mail in a given folder/branch.