Rogue Amoeba - Under The Microscope

More Follow-up To Mail, The OS And Frameworks

Fri, 06 Jul 2007

It seems the Derik DeLong over at MacUser ran with my off-the-cuff comment about MailKit before I even got to post Restarting Innovation. Derik, at 5:23 AM, you should be asleep, not blogging.

Ultimately, I don't care specifically about "MailKit". What I think is important is the idea of Apple providing more backend engines, upon which front-ends can be built. MailKit is a great example of that, but a FinderKit (for replacing the Finder), a MediaKit (for audio), and so on, could also be quite useful.

On Restarting Innovation

Michael Tsai has an in-depth response posted on his blog. To be honest, even I'm not sure frameworks are the solution. It does seem that there are problem spaces like mail and the web, however, where the core problem can be addressed once. Currently, we get multiple developers spending months re-inventing the wheel, or no developers working on the problem at all.

On Competing With Mail

Matt Ronge has been working on MailCore, the heart of Kiwi. The idea here is similar to the MailKit concept I mentioned. It's coming from a third party, however, which means it lacks Apple's resources, and it also doesn't seem to do POP. Nonetheless, it's certainly an interesting start. Matt has some comments on email.

As far as a commercial email client goes, I don't believe selling one to be impossible, though I do think it's a tough road. However, believing a market exists for a "Mail Pro" isn't the same as such a market actually existing.

Competing with free and bundled Mail is only part of the problem. Perhaps more importantly, there's a history of failed/no-longer-active third-party commercial mail clients. Taking a look at the current landscape, I have to ask one question: If there's no viable commercial email client now, what's going to change in the future to make it possible?

Posted by Paul | Permalink | View/Post Comments (3)

Comments

aj
Sat Jul 7 16:08:25 2007

I think what's interesting is that there is no single email platform for the Mac, in the same sense as Microsoft Exchange / Outlook, and even though Microsoft has enhanced Entourage over the years, it's not a "full" Exchange client either.

So maybe it's time for a real "pro" email platform that's better than Exchange. The core could be an open, standards-based server-side platform with documented APIs, optional modules, plugins and the like, but with lots of proprietary "glue" to provide elegant, usable, advanced back-end services that make sense for power users and newbies alike.

Of course, to get a shot at market penetration beyond the Mac userbase, it'd have to be cross-platform, but who knows? maybe enough IT departments are getting sick of patching Exchange Server; maybe it can be positioned as better for small businesses who don't have a cadre of MCSE's on the payroll!

Chris
Sun Jul 8 21:21:19 2007

> If there's no viable commercial email client now, what's going to change in the future to make it possible?

If you get the UI right (which is to say: both simple and powerful), you could make money. Basically, you need to do what Apple would do if they performed a top-to-bottom rethink/UI audit of Mail.app (not the summer intern-quality stuff they did for everything in Leopard).

In fairness, here's the way the clients went down:

1. Eudora -> originated on the Mac -> cross-platform -> moving to open source

2. Claris Emailer -> essentially became Entourage (or at least the Entourage team adopted the UI feel via the Emailer author moving to MS. But they moronically traded a file-based database on a filesystem (HFS) that cannot handle a file-based database for a central database file on a file system (HFS+) that can easily handle a file-based database).

3. Mailsmith -- people who like BBEdit like it a lot, but BareBones refuses to implement IMAP, and it has a central database instead of standard storage.

4. PowerMail -- I don't know, is this still around? It was crap the last time I looked.

5. Mulberry -- refused to implement POP for a long time. Then, suicide.

6. QuickMail -- apparently still in use in some places.

Not a single one of them has or had a great UI; Eudora was probably the best, but never lost the Mac Plus-era feel. Emailer/Entourage's six-clicks-to-add-another-address UI may be the worst. QuickMail circa 1995 was pretty nice to use, but not really email in the sense we know today.

Derik
Sun Jul 8 23:02:09 2007

What's this sleep thing you and everyone else is going on about?

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