Solid article. I do hope to see more people enter the client side of the Email world because personally, I think that is what is slacking. There needs to be better Email clients that are more divorce than JUST supporting Gmail or JUST being on your mobile device. I don't think that Email, in general, is broken. I would rather just see better clients out there to make it more usable. More usable by handling attachments better, or sorting, etc. I still have yet to find a good Email client that works well with various Email account types (<i>Gmail, Exchange, etc.</i>) on different device types (<i>Desktop or Mobile</i>). Airmail [1] is probably the closest, but even that has tons of flaws. My example, if you are using a fork (<i>Email client</i>) to eat cereal, you don't blame cereal (<i>Email</i>) for not working correctly.<p>[1] <a href="http://airmailapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://airmailapp.com/</a>
As if a sticky, following you around top bar wasn't enough, they also have a bottom bar? It's like reading from a driver's seat of a tank.<p>Where has this terrible trend originated?
Email's great. Your company just sucks.<p>I've seen it before. The boss doesn't want to defer responsibility. So they have everything go through their approval. Suddenly, you're CCing the boss on every thing you send, leaving behind a train of emails to cover your ass. Soon, other bosses demand the same treatment, and before you know it, everyone's inbox is cluttered with FWDs, and Reply-Alls, making sure nobody is left out of the loop.<p>Your company should have an email policy.<p>The one UI improvement I can see: make the reply all button hard to find, so morons don't accidentally click it.
Anyone who's trying to think of new ways to disrupt email should take a look at this:
<a href="http://visualidiot.com/articles/mailappapp" rel="nofollow">http://visualidiot.com/articles/mailappapp</a>
Email is not just IMAP and SMTP. It's much much more (even thought technically speaking the following doesn't have anything to do with email).<p>Pretty much the only way to invite someone to a meeting at work is to send invite over email. To figure out the place for your meeting, you use "email" client for that. Because you have not sent emails previously to all participants, you use "email" client to figure out the email address of those persons. And the recipients use their "email" client to update their calendar so they remember to come to the meeting.<p>So to disrupt email, you need to disrupt calendaring and address books and what ever it is called when you search your co-workers email address by their partial name or some wacky username.<p>It's a mess and a huge beast.
I don't get the logic that starts with "Technology is moving fast but email doesn't change" and leads to the solution being papering over email's faults with some slick UI. It's like the whole city's water pressure is failing and everyone is complaining about faucet design instead of that we're using two thousand year old aqueducts. We need more out of online communication than email can give us at a really fundamental level. Suffice to say, my thoughts on this are longer than an HN comment: <a href="http://structur.al/articles/after-email/" rel="nofollow">http://structur.al/articles/after-email/</a>
Good points, though the article doesn't talk about attachments, which are a terrible pain... It's seeing quite a lot of disruption, with the likes of We Transfer or infinit.io, but now that Google Drive covers this for me I haven't used those services as much.
An exciting email client project is in development at <a href="http://mailpile.is/" rel="nofollow">http://mailpile.is/</a> - a self hosted open-source gmail work-alike. (live demo on the site)
I'd like to see the UI be more IM-like.<p>Edit: Guess I can try to explain. Email messages have become much shorter and back-and-forths are frequent (and not always best solved with a call). IM has almost no spam so the idea would be to strike a better balance between only hearing from people you know against the need for "cold emailing". Google's new tabs sort of address this. IM still suffers from fragmentation so there'd be a benefit from using the universal email protocols (so long as unwanted messages could be contained).