You decode me right through baby right through like an mp3 baby right through right through.

[reddragdiva]

• NotN: Barrowman exposes himself on radio; "Community Payback" vests revitalise low-end clothing market; New plans for unemployed and immigrants in Queen's Speech.

• DailyPhoto seems to be much more popular than DailyPic.co.uk. The geeky focus, the text and all the Creative Commons attribution the whiniest creator could ask for encourage people to propagate links. Good!

I used to read my mail on mutt on a terminal. I ended up not quite reading stuff ever. No folders, tagging or spam filtering.

Then I read it on Thunderbird on my PC. Folders, tagging and good spam filtering (though you still have to download the stuff). But somehow I never quite got around to answering what I meant to or reading much of my list mail (150+ messages a day).

Now I use Gmail. I pretty much live in it. (I only use IM at all because Gmail comes with a Jabber client.) I keep up with my mail! Mostly.

The key innovation of Gmail for me is that mail is in three states: unread, read and archived. The third category, I can't see it but it's there in a search.

Other nice innovations I like: the conversation threading (I now read my list mail), good search, even better spam filtering than Thunderbird.

Keeping one's life on someone else's commercial server is risky in obvious ways. So it'd be nice to have something as usable as Gmail on my desktop.

So. What would it take to add the following features to Thunderbird?

• Three-state mail, with the archived stuff disappearing from sight but still in search.
• really good full text search, so archived stuff can actually be found. (Text search! It's a SOLVED PROBLEM!)
• I can live without the conversation threading, but that'd be nice too. I like the Gmail interface much better than the standard-since-1994 three-pane interface.

What are my chances on this?

Comments

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

UTSL.

Also, in what way is your three-state model different from save-to-another-folder (or pre-user folders, which is what I use and AFAIK still mutt's default) in either mutt or Thunderbird?

[reddragdiva]

When I've tried it, I never look in them.

Does Thunderbird have good text search across all mailbox files now?

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't know, I refuse to touch gui mail clients. Hell, I was grumpy about upgrading to mutt from elm because I was too lazy to fix all of elm's y2k issues.

[drzero.livejournal.com]

great title :) took me a few seconds to comprehend.

[http://users.livejournal.com/raven_/]

I've gotta say, that while it's a bit ugly to have so much email lurking, I LOVE me my gmail. I love the archiving and labelling system and the threading. LOVE.

[sciamachy.livejournal.com]

I used to use mutt too, but I installed SpamAssassin & another collective Bayesian spam thingummy that I can't remember the name of - but basically one of the checks SpamAssassin did was look up the sender on this service to see if it was blacklisted & weight its decision accordingly. Mutt was able, with a keypress, to both tell SpamAssassin & this service that the message was spam (& therefore blacklist the sender) so between the two I had no spam woes. But yeah, Gmail rocks utterly.

[thorfinn]

I use Apple Mail - but to get three state without moving things into folders, I use "flagging" and smart folders (pre-configured searches).

And the text search works rather well. :-) I have a fairly huge amount of mail sitting around on IMAP servers, across several different accounts, and I can just search the lot.

Of course, it's not exactly open source - I don't think they've even released a windos version yet, let alone anything else.

[nilasae.livejournal.com]

While this all speaks for Apple Mail the threading mechanism makes me sick so I'm still sticking to Thunderbird...

[reddragdiva]

They came up with yet another one?

Gmail is not so good for the variety of geek-infested mailing list where they openly oppose putting "[listname]" in the subject line, unless/until you mess around with labels, etc.

[thorfinn]

*nod* Apple Mail's threading is a bit... non-existent, unfortunately. I wish they'd do it and provide it as an option, but it's not likely to ever happen - too many idiots get horribly confused by threading. :-/ Sad, I know.

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

I've been using gmail for two years, and I love it SO MUCH.

[severina-242.livejournal.com]

I would pay good money to get a glimpse of John Barrowman´s famous cake cutting cock.

[reddragdiva]

I suspect this is why the BBC was happy to publicise this - "By the way, we have the sexiest man on British television working for us. And he's openly gay-as, but all you ladies STILL fancy him rotten. So there."

[severina-242.livejournal.com]

John is my gay crush - replacing Simon Callow who is getting on a bit. Still love Simon though... great guy.

John Barrowman is lovely though, he always has time for his fans for one, and he loves animals. He´s very sweet. And he´s a fantastic Captain Jack.

[brassratgirl.livejournal.com]

I don't care about archiving but live and die by threaded conversations. Only thing that makes our mailing lists even slightly bearable.

[nilasae.livejournal.com]

Not much to add except for "let me know when you find something that fits all this please!"

[themadcatlady.livejournal.com]

Have you written to the Mozilla people? You should definitely suggest those. All good ideas.

Or the Google team should come up with actual desktop email software, which would be nice.

[reddragdiva]

Google want you to use their web service ('cos it's got ads on it - and sometimes they're well worth it for the inadvertent humour), but they make your Gmail mailbox completely accessible via IMAP, so any current desktop mail client can talk to it freely - you can download your mail automatically without affecting the contents of your Gmail on the Google server.

So it's just a Simple Matter Of Programming! %-D

[themadcatlady.livejournal.com]

Yes, I already use IMAP with my Gmail in Thunderbird - I still find it much slower than using the Gmail web service though. Even worse, using GMail IMAP in Windows Live Mail, it´s *horrendously* slow loading. Using Thunderbird is good, but I demand MORE SPEED! ;)

[reddragdiva]

It's slower because you have to download the mail to use it - in the webmail, you only see the list until you click on the mail. Remember the olden days, pressing "Get mail" each morning and watching the message counter ticking?

[themadcatlady.livejournal.com]

Hey, I know how IMAP works. ;)

It was, however, MUCH slower when using Windows Live Mail (hell knows why, but after a few weeks I didn´t want to put up with it any longer), so I switched back to Thunderbird with my Gmail.

[thorfinn]

You telling Thunderbird to cache copies of everything locally? If you are, and it's still slow, then the programmers need a good kick up the bum.

[themadcatlady.livejournal.com]

Aha! That would be "Download Messages for offline use when going offline" in the Offline Settings? And there´s me thinking that would be ON by default. Have turned that on now. Probably wasn´t ON by default in Window Live Mail (which I tried previously) either!

Thanks for that tip.

[thorfinn]

Oops. :-) Yes, that should speed things up rather a lot. Search via IMAP is pretty poor. Search on local cache is going to be buckets faster. Even without a nice index and such, puters and disk is fast enough these days that just scanning the whole local copy is actually not too bad.

[themadcatlady.livejournal.com]

I don´t use search very often anyway - I have an amazing filing system, even if I say so myself, and I file things away straight away usually, so I usually find things just by looking in the corresponding folders. I *am* German after all, so being über-organised is my perogative! ;)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I swear I don't really understand the problem-space.[1]

The console-mailers (pine for preference) are ideal for deleting vast amounts of system junk that's been delivered to a mbox file. (select; select all like this; delete; expunge)

Gmail? Huh? It's a sodding web application. The usability's b0rked.
(On the other hand, you wouldn't believe how many useless fucks block IMAP(S) on their shoddy hotel wireless. Christ. The future of the bloody internets is going to be everything up port 80.)

Thunderbird and some rudimentary filtering Works For Me. Oh, and setting the 'check email in these folders' option. The titles come up bold when there's a message in them. Apparently that's hard to grasp.

IMAP is a shit protocol, mind.

[1] Yer man Doctorow had a bit of a rant about this, and I was standing there really not knowing what the problem was. I suspect it's a fifty-fifty ball: I have a system that works, no-one else has managed to explain why it's more brain-damaged than the one they want.

[reddragdiva]

Horses for courses, definitely. This post is all about ME ME ME.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Text search! It's a SOLVED PROBLEM!)

Actually, no it isn't, except for the limited case where the user genuinely wants an exhaustive list of all records matching the search query, and isn't much fussed about the order, or there exists a very small number of easily-distinguishable ordering criteria that the overwhelming majority of users a) understand and b) want.

Search in any more general case - as in, most real-world applications - is *hard*.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Gnus?

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Oh and a GUI mail client that allows you to use (and redefine) single character commands a la all the text-mode clients would be close to top of my wishlist. shift-command-R to do a reply-all?