ice crums

I use Mail.app everyday for my five email accounts and can only say bad things about it. It crashes a lot(even more since 10.5.2), it’s clumsy and doesn’t really help with organization. In 2004 Gmail innovated with their easy to use simple approach, but has not done much for multiple email accounts(some support, but no innovation).

There’s Zimbra but it doesn’t really appeal to me since i don’t really like the UI.

I’ve commented a few times how email is dead and needs to be rethought. I wrote a post last year where I described how the notification/email landscape had changed with the rise of web apps and social networks:

Facebook, Google Docs and Pownce are the start of these types of applications which would eliminate use of email in order to connect socially in context. Why should I send a spreadsheet via email, when I can just share it. This is the start of the true democratic, capitalistic internet. Where communications(i.e. shared spreadsheet) will have to fight over a notification of a tag photo of you in facebook.

I am not alone in this, here are serious pundits commenting on this:

-Om Malik declared email bankruptcy last year.
-Brent Simmons dislikes Mail.app for some interesting reasons.

So why do I bring this up? Well Mozilla spun off Thunderbird into a separate company called Mozilla Messaging which plans to revamp Thunderbird for it’s v3.0.

Good or bad move?

For one, Paul Stamatiou thinks it’s bad:

It doesn’t seem like the type of paradigm shift Mozilla is aiming for with the creation of Mozilla Messaging and the aura floating around it. David seems to be missing the whole movement towards web applications. Unless Mozilla starts recognizing this, they will remain behind hugely successful web applications geared towards email communications, such as Google Apps and Zimbra Collaboration Suite.

Remember Paul, Mozilla is working on their (currently vaporware) Weave project, which promises data portability to and from web services:

…it could provide the ability for users to synchronize profile data between computers (with the ability to grant fine grained access rights to third-parties), or provide new tools for interacting with all of the various social networks…

But then again, Paul seems to do just fine with Gmail, as I did when I was a college student. Business requires a serious email client. It has to be fast, reliable and readily available.

I love web apps, but desktop(specially Mac ones) have a special place in my heart, for their stability, dependability, ease of use and inter app desktop collaboration which makes using them a breeze.

Some has to do this job and who better than the exFirefox guys.

Why I am glad: they will probably build be a stable multi-platform, hopefully innovative solution to email, with an API to support plugins for maximum customizability. They’ve already done a few of these things with the last few version of Thunderbird, but it’s still light years away from being a truly remarkable product.

BTW: it’s Inbox 5.0 and not 2.0 since it really need to change substantially to adapt to the increasing streams of informations. Besides, it makes it a great Digg title…lol

Here are two startups trying to innovate in the email space: Orgoo and Xobni.