• The Email-SIG Archives – Archives of group working on email package in python
• Link Grammar – grammar parsing package homepage as part of abiword
• Overview — NetworkX 1.6 documentation –
• dmalcolm – Automatically detecting reference-count bugs in Python extension modules –
• PyCon US 2012: Parsing Horrible Things – If you've ever wanted to get started with parsers, here's your chance for a ground-floor introduction. A harebrained spare-time project gives birth to a whirlwind journey from basic algorithms to Python libraries and, at last, to a parser for one of the craziest syntaxes out there: the MediaWiki grammar that drives Wikipedia.
• PyCon US 2012: Python for data lovers – Exploring and analyzing data can be daunting and time-consuming, even for data lovers. Python can make the process fun and exciting. We will present techniques of data analysis, along with python tools that help you explore and map data. Our talk includes examples that show how python libraries such as csvkit, matplotlib, scipy, networkx and pysal can help you dig into and make sense of your data.
• PyCon US 2012: Time series analysis in python – Analyzing, storing and visualizing time-series efficiently are recurring though difficult tasks in various aspects of scientific data analysis such as meteorological forecasting, financial modeling, … In this talk we will explore the current Python ecosystem for doing this effectively, comparing options, using only open source packages that are mature yet still under active development.
• PyCon US 2012: Email package – The email package in the Python Standard library has had a somewhat rocky transition into the Python3 era, and still doesn't handle non-ASCII easily. That is about to change. This talk will compare how things worked in Python2 (the past), how things work now (in Python3.2), and how things will work much better in the future (hopefully Python3.3).
• PyCon US 2012: Advanced SQLAlchemy – How do you take the big step from casual SQLAlchemy user, who treats your database as a mysterious object store, to advanced power user, who optimizes critical queries, plans indexing and migrations, and generates efficient reports? This talk will teach you how databases think; why humanity invented the Relational Algebra; and how SQLAlchemy grants you access to relational power.
• PyCon US 2012 : Python FUSE – Contrary to classical kernel residing file-systems in *NIX, FUSE is an API to develop file systems in user space. This talk details internals of FUSE, developing your own file-system with Python-FUSE, followed by creative application of Python-FUSE based file system.
• PyCon US 2012: What's new in the PyStdLib – Lots of Interesting stuff has gone into Python Standard library in 2.7, 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 release. Some interesting features that went in really make programmers life easy and it can bring in a 'wow' factor to their code. Additionally, it can also help the external library developers to relook at the their libraries to use new facilities available from standard library modules. This talk distills stuff from What's new document from 2.7, 3.2 and 3.3 and presents some of the choicest new features from Python standard library. Since a lots has gone in since 2.7, focus would be given to those which have had good discussion in tracker or in python-dev and would in general was a most sought out one.
• PyCon US 2012: Code Generation in Python: Dismantling Jinja – For many DSLs such as templating languages it's important to use code generation to achieve acceptable performance in Python. The current version of Jinja went through many different iterations to end up where it is currently. This talk walks through the design of Jinja2's compiler infrastructure and why it works the way it works and how one can use newer Python features for better results.
• Mailman 3 — PyCon US 2012 – Mailman 3 has been in development for several years. This is an evolution of the ever popular mailing list management system that runs thousands of mailing lists around the world. This talk describes how the code has been modernized and how the architectural deficiencies of Mailman 2 have been addressed using REST and other technologies. This is a spinoff from the AOSA chapter on Mailman 3.
• RelEx Dependency Relationship Extractor – OpenCog – RelEx, a narrow-AI component of OpenCog, is an English-language semantic dependency relationship extractor, built on the Carnegie-Mellon Link Grammar parser. It uses a series of graph rewriting rules to identify subject, object, indirect object and many other syntactic dependency relationships between words in a sentence. That is, it generates the dependency trees of a dependency grammar. Its set of dependency relations it employs resemble those of Dekang Lin's MiniPar and the Stanford parser (and it has an explicit compatibility mode). It is inspired in part by the ideas of Hudson's Word Grammar.
• Could you start a blog on this thing? –
• Chinese high end CPUs are now in the game – details: Part 2, Alpha by VR-Zone.com – Chinese supercomputer uses Alpha architecture. Article has some interesting details and some cringeworthy breathless praise for the lamented Alpha chips…

• InfoQ: Interview: Richard Hipp on UnQL, a New Query Language for Document Databases –
• Thunderbird & Evolution Usability Testing « Canonical Design –

• Computational science: …Error : Nature News – "…why scientific programming does not compute." I too have worked with large codebases from non-programmers. It can be difficult to tell a brilliant physicist that programming well is hard. After QED, nothing seems hard.
• Attachments.me – A nice interface to searching your email, with a focus on attachments. But they're not a hosting provider , so it is not immediately clear what's stopping your email provider (say gmail) from adding this and wiping out the business?
• waffle → Perturbingly – Jesper reading the tea leaves on Growl dropping features to get into the mac app store.

• WordPress for iOS – I didn't know this existed. Looks pretty nice.
• @hotdogsladies on the email charter idea –
• Circles: Facebook’s reality failure is Google+’s opportunity – He likes the ability to group people differently, something Facebook sort of has, but never made easy. I like the idea too, but I think they could go further – sometimes you might want the type of relationship you have to be public. I'm not on G+, so I don't know if that's possible. Can you make circle names public sometimes?
• We Have to Fix E-Mail – NYTimes.com – Pogue likes the email charter. He adds a few good ideas that seem like common sense to me. Like Chuq said, isn't this just netiquette?
• American McCarver – Hockey-only RSS feed for the new sports weblog: (sorry, @gruber)

• Daring Fireball: Simple Inbox Archiving Script for Apple Mail – From 2007, John Gruber’s archiving applescript keeps his inbox clear of read, nonflagged items. (Apparently broken in Lion.) Sounds like this is manually invoked though. (update: it is.)
• Time to bake smart correction tools into news platforms — Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard – Scott Rosenberg on how news CMSs need to include public-viewable change-tracking. One of those things that seems obvious for a programmer…

• Postbox 2.5 Now Available! — Postbox – Why is 64-bit support the first bullet point?
• Avoiding email bankruptcy (part 1) – Chuqui 3.0 – Part 1 of 2: learn to recognize that email takes time and block out time to deal with it
• Avoiding email bankruptcy (part 2) – Chuqui 3.0 – Part 2: Chuq explains his email workflow. Nice and sane, very similar to what I do.

Maybe it’s to integrate comments from a bunch of people while you’re editing a report, or it’s a set of mails with instructions for something, like how to configure & install a source code package or submit expense reports in the new system. These emails could all be in one thread, but just as often it’s a few mails spread throughout several threads and scattered in time.

A good mail client should make it easy to keep arbitrary groups of messages visible for reference. Since they’re reference emails, you’re just reading them, and the display shouldn’t really be more than the text of the mail. You should be able to fit a few of these on screen without overlapping what you’re actually working on, and you don’t need a big toolbar with a bunch of actions that won’t be happening.

When I’m doing something in another app, I want to arrange my reference mails in an empty part of the screen, then not click back over to the mail client until I’m ready to close them. The faster it is to set up this display and get on with things, the better.

Let’s look at how a few existing clients support this kind of thing:

Gmail

It’s easy to open a conversation and refer to it, and you can hide the body of messages that aren’t relevant. But you can’t move things around, so if it’s a really long thread, you might be in for some scrolling. If you want to refer to more than one thread, you will have to open each in its own window.

Apple Mail

Because of its lack of a conversation-style thread view, the way to do this is to just open separate windows for each message. You can’t look at a single thread in one window – have to open N windows for N messages. Ugh.

Since Mail is what I use most often, when I have this problem I always end up with a flock of windows, and lots of clicking, scrolling and cmd-tabbing around to see what I need, followed by looking at all my open windows and trying not to close any unrelated drafts or accidentally send or delete something important.

Postbox & Thunderbird

The experience with Postbox is similar to, but a little worse than GMail. In Postbox, there’s a thread view where I can hide uninteresting messages like GMail, but if I want to pop the thread out into a separate window, I can’t – only single messages can be popped into separate windows. I can make tabs with the thread view by double-clicking on a thread, but I can’t figure out how to get a new window. Of course, if I need to see multiple emails at once, tabs are no good.

Thunderbird is basically the same, except at least in 3.0.4, the default view when you select a thread is less useful than Postbox’s – it looks more like a debug dump of the message’s text than a well-designed display.

MailMate

MailMate is similar to Postbox & Thunderbird – except that you get a nice linear conversation-style view with any selection, not just a single thread. (Postbox has a nice view but only for a thread, and TBird shows you any selection but not a nice view.)

Still, as with those others, the linear conversation view can’t be popped into its own reading-oriented window, and it’s strictly linear.

Summary

I don’t think any of the clients I looked at have a good solution for this. Is that a problem? Is this actually important?

I think so. I bet if you think about when you actually look at an email, it’s usually one of three times – when you first read it, as you write a reply to it, and when you’re searching for it later. In both of the second two cases, I’ve found that I often have more than one mail or thread that I want to look at while I write or do something in another app, and a dedicated view to support that would be great. I could search through just those messages. I could minimize or move them all at once. Just think of the possibilities!

Finally, if it’s easy to keep this set of emails around for later reference without cluttering up my screen in the meantime – and without actually moving the messages into some separate folder on my server – that’d be really great. Because you always have another expense report to file, and really, who wants to memorize that procedure?

Thanks for reading this far, and please feel free to leave a comment – am I missing something great in one of these clients?

The start of a 3-part series on GMail from Adam Engst. He was a long-time Eudora user, so it’s interesting to see how his workflow changed when he moved to such a different program.

Also, as a journalist I’m sure he gets tons more email than average people, and he can’t afford to just ignore it.

Again, I’ll point at Merlin Mann as my original inspiration, and if you want to hear more about the reasons behind this line of thought, go listen to his recent podcast appearances.

Further – I’m against unread counts, against new-mail sounds, against pop-up notification of new mail. I can’t think of a job you could have where there’s a good reason you should be interrupted by an email client for every new message. Sure, some things are important and ought to interrupt you – but there are a host of better technologies for urgent communication – IM, SMS, Phone calls, etc.

I’m for search, against filing. If you’re shuffling email into folders, part of what you’re doing is building an index. Computers know how to index text, and they can do it faster and more completely than you can, so stop wasting your time – especially if you’re just filing it according to data that’s already in the message, like sender or date. If your filing system is adding some information to each message, then a client should just let you add that info quickly and then index it for you. Not enough clients do this well.

Finally, like many people, I work at a big company that runs its own email infrastructure and won’t be giving control to Google any time soon. This means that while GMail is an interesting case study and a useful option for personal email, I need to use another client for most of my email. That’s why mikechecksmail is about desktop mail clients. I use a Mac, and so it’s about Mac desktop mail clients. That said, I won’t ignore other systems – good ideas are good ideas.

What’s my philosophy on email? If you want the original inspiration in long form, check out what Merlin Mann has been saying for years now, at Inbox Zero. The short version, which might look funny on a site where I plan to talk about email clients, is that most of what people don’t like about email isn’t the email software’s fault. If email is a huge problem for your work, you probably can’t solve it with a better client. I can’t agree more.

However, that’s no reason not to insist on continued improvements in the one tool every single knowledge worker uses, and that’s what this site is about.