Brent Simmons started a discussion yesterday about email apps for OS X. To summarize: Apple Mail doesn’t do enough for everyone, and the alternatives aren’t so great either. But because it is free, there’s no incentive for a third party to do better.
Paul Kafasis agrees, saying “Don’t compete with Free and Don’t compete with Apple”. He draws the comparison between email apps and browsers, where there is very little money to be made as a result of the many excellent free browsers out there. He also compares the situation to music players - it seems like everyone’s got a pet feature they would add to iTunes, so there ought to be an audience for a couple music players, except competing with iTunes is just not a good business plan.
I do think there is a market for a pro email client for OS X, and I’ll use another core app category to explain - Text Editors. I think they are a better analogy than music or browsers. Shipping in every Mac, TextEdit is a solid basic free editor, but everyone needs something more. Some people need styles, grammar checking, layout control, and graphics - so they move to Word, Pages, or OpenOffice.org. Clearly, there’s money to be made there, if only by Microsoft. Other people need regex search and replace, code completion, syntax checking, block editing, etc. - so they move on to a programmer’s editor. How is the market for programmer’s editors? XCode is free and very good, emacs, vim, etc. are also free and excellent. But there are people making money selling text editors. People buy BBEdit, TextMate, and SubEthaEdit because these programs have important features that give you more power over something that they do all day. TextMate is my favorite example here, because it benefits from community involvement with bundles and plugins to customize and add power.
Does that sound familiar? It should - many of us spend more time than we’d like reading and answering email. For some, it’s their whole job. An email client that had unique and compelling features for professionals, knew its audience, had strong Mac-like design, and supported community extension, would be successful, just like TextMate.
Imagine if there was just a single bundled text editor for Macs, and we had to use it for writing everything from programming to business reports to family letters. Wouldn’t it be annoying when an update came around and they added stationery and voice notes when you wanted refactoring support and better version-control integration? “Email client” isn’t just a single app category, and it’s about time someone realized it.
11:25 am July 5, 2007
I for one would immediately buy the ‘TextMate for email.’
Yes! Please.
I’m behind a big community effort, if one’s ever started, to write an email client that doesn’t suck.
I think I would love a “Textmate for email.” However I tend to just use Gmail as a web client, and I don’t see much reason to switch from it even if some great new app comes out.
The problem is very simple. Apple Mail is an everything but a good IMAP client.
I really hope that Kiwi and MailCore are getting somewhere soon. And I don’t believe that Apple will release a better IMAP client with Leopard.
The same way I don’t believe that Apple will release a full featured Jabber client with Leopard.
It will cover the basics or less.
So there is a lot of room for improvements.
I agree. Mail is unusable with a high volume of mail, I don’t trust it. In a way competing with Apple is the tried and true way to succeed. MacWord introduced us to word processing, FullWrite, Word, etc became huge giving more power to those who {want/need/willing to pay} for it. Same with MacPaint and SuperPaint, etc right up to Photoshop. I see no reason to assume the game has changed. Apple always needs to support the most basic newbie ever. Thats their role. Its up to us to fill out the details…
I definitely agree that there’s always a market for a better, paid-for product. But “better” is the key word.
As others have mentioned, MailCore & Kiwi are what I’ve been watching for quite some time:
http://makkintosshu.dyndns.org/journal/regarding-mail-pro
The e-mail discussion is a not very new. Hard-core e-mail user type use Eudora. No question that better interfaces are around. Apple mail was never stable over a period of at least 3 years. My favorites at the moment Eudora, Mulberry, Thunderbird and Entourage
Mulberry does have the most potential at this time. But they need a strong GUI OS X programmer. Apple Mail doesn’t even have proper Adressbook Export functions.
(There is one key question - Why works the NeXTstep Mail like a champ on every Openstep software compared to Apple Mail ?)
The future of e-mail in general. Negativ in a lot of companies.
System should go into direction like Intend from Codefab. Other Systems like Oracle Groupware. CRM Users like to have the mail in the right place like Daylite Users.
Notes for Apple a nightmare. JAVA slow very slow even on a Windows XP slow.
Correo looks promising. http://nkreeger.com/correo/ Free, apple-ized, address book integration, mozilla imap engine…
For an email client, I just want an Aquafied Pine. Plain text browser that offloads any media to helper apps.
Integration with AddressBook is fine, but not required.
I want it to support IMAP and Kerberos.
I would pay for it.
Nice post Mike. I actually seriously considered writing a to-sell email client only last week, but decided against it only because I’d be spending months writing so many basic frameworks. Email standards are dreadfully important and boring to get right, and take a very long time to get robust: IMAP, RFC822, SMTP, and even just parsing mbox and Maildir properly without going mad. If were were a standard, robust MailKit framework around that handled all the gory details, I think you’d start seeing as many email clients around as Twitter clients. I think there’s good money to be made here: PowerMail, GyazMail, Eudora and MailSmith are all still going strong, and they suck as much as Apple Mail, only in different ways.
Correo may be a solution in a year or two, but I fear that the Camino and Thunderbird code base they’re inheriting is going to substantially affect their future development. (I have nothing against Camino nor Thunderbird as a user, but I’ve seen some of the innards of the code. As a spoiled Cocoa developer brat, I’d certainly want to stay as far away from it as possible.)
I can just feel Steven Frank looking at these threads trying to come up with a new Panic application codename. C’mon Steven, we’d all buy it :). (Hey, you made a kickass application for FTP, one of the crappiest and most mundane protocols of all time! Email’s surely not much harder…)
Apple Mail sucks less than anything else. I wouldn’t use a mail app that doesn’t integrate with OS X’s address book.
I’ll second Correo. It’s only at a 0.2 release, but now is the time to get involved if you would like to contribute and mold it in the Email client that everyone is lusting after. I’ve emailed Nik about contributing to it, and he’s open to collaborations.
[...] It could work: a 3rd party email client for OS X [...]
What we need is 5 really good Objective C programmer’s spending a “Google Summer Plus Autumn of Code” writing the basics (i.e. the hard part) of an Open Source, dead-simple, email counterpart to WebKit. I haven’t had an in-depth look at MailCore yet, so I don’t know wether it would be possible to start from there. But for God’s sake, this has to happen.
Maybe we should start a high-profile community project and do some marketing to get developers and financial backing for them? Lobby independent Mac developers to put some money into this? Just throwing ideas around…
[...] If you’re thinking of writing a commercially successful pro email client for Mac OS X, here’s some advice along the lines of what I wrote yesterday: [...]
[...] of People are talking about Brent’s recent article about the problems with mail. However there is an [...]
I’d agree about the hardcore user still being on Eudora.
I’ve tried everything else, but only Eudora manages two dozen personalities competently with 10,000 of emails in (quickly) searchable archives over a decade.
Nothing.
Totally customiseable as well.
Alas, it doesn’t look like Thunderbird/Penelope will get the job done.
Eudora is still open source now. Somebody should just dive in and rescue the best of Eudora, put a Cocoa wrapper on it and throw a webkit browser into it to handle HTML and unicode.