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?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?