confirmations..

it's always nice to find it's own thought confirmed by someone much smarter then one self - here, rob pike from google in this slashdot article:

One of the big insights in the last few years, through work by the internet search engines but also tools like Udi Manber's glimpse, is that data with no meaningful structure can still be very powerful if the tools to help you search the data are good. In fact, structure can be bad if the structure you have doesn't fit the problem you're trying to solve today, regardless of how well it fit the problem you were solving yesterday. So I don't much care any more how my data is stored; what matters is how to retrieve the relevant pieces when I need them.

Grep was the definitive Unix tool early on; now we have tools that could be characterized as `grep my machine' and `grep the Internet'. GMail, Google's mail product, takes that idea and applies it to mail: don't bother organizing your mail messages; just put them away for searching later. It's quite liberating if you can let go your old file-and-folder-oriented mentality. Expect more liberation as searching replaces structure as the way to handle data.

q.e.d ;)

batting the bat or how i switched email clients..

there are different kindes of email clients. on the pc side of the world you can maybe differentiate between outlook-like types (easy and unflexible) and netscape mail-like types (the classical 3 panel setup - folders, messages, message preview - multiple accounts, filters and so on..).

i've always been in the latter camp with using, certainly, netscape, pmmail/2 and for the last years the bat.

the bat has always been the closest to pmmail, that's why it has been chosen at the time (some 4 years ago) and it was fast as hell even with giant message bases at that time of some 10.000 messages.

but - this was then and now is now. the world of email changed radically, first with the heavy increase of spam, than of virii and worms and later with the demand for increased mobility and the need for synchronisation or online access to you mailbox by IMAP. today, message bases of power users count in the gigabytes and 100.000 messages.

using an email client seems to be a bit like driving a car of a certain brand. when you need a new car you take the successor of your old one. so, when a new version of my mail client is released, i certainly use that.

with the bat it was the same, i shelled out the 45 EUR for the business version, i use it partly for that purpose and appreciate the work on a program of that complexity.

but then, things went ugly. the IMAP support in the bat's 1.x branch was crude but usable, it basically provided the same functionality like you had with POP3. the 2.0 release of the bat, expected and announced for years, promised high and mighty "full IMAPrev1 support" - but what an exaggeration!

from the developers point of view this statement may even have been right - client and server could exchange commands and data according to IMAPrev1 - but the client side was so lousy! basic UI considerations like instant feedback was not provided. filtering mechanisms - the proud of the POP3 side of the bat just didn't work.

but not enough, after waiting some months until the arrival of a maintenance version which, after some testing, provided at least an again usable IMAP support i bought my license in the hope that ritlabs (the developers of the bat) are working on fullfilling their promises. a week later they suddenly removed the "full IMAP-support" advertising. great. i bought a new version with a lot of new but mostly questionable usefull features minus one usefull. thanks.

it was time to look thoroughly for an alternative.

finding an email client with full IMAP support turned out to be hopeless - if i didn't want to change to, cough, outlook. yes, outlook is the only email client on the market which uses the strong points of IMAP to an extent, that you could call "innovative". it hurts a bit to say such things abut the big evil from redmond ;), but hey, honour where honour belongs to.. IMAP offers multiple connections to servers, server side folders and searching, server side implemented instant notification about new messages without the need to check "every x minutes" (not all servers support all features, but there are enough out there who do). but these features are supported only by outlook and to some extent by mulberry (which has a lot of drawbacks in other areas, IMHO)

ok, i forgot about my IMAP dreams and concentrated on the client's capabilities when it comes to managing my mail. i have multiple accounts, i have a lot of contacts, receive some 100 mails a day and never throw away anything - i keep even spam for some time - you never know what's gonna happen to your penis ;)

after installing and uninstalling some ten or fifteen different demo versions of email clients i sat back and tried to tackle the problem differently - by thinking about it.

my first question was "what is email?" email is an exchange of information - and more and more a tool for archiving it. you can at best compare it with the letters and documents you find in your (real life) mailbox. and suddenly i realized something strange: in the last years i had developed two completely different approaches of handling email on the one side and dead tree documents on the other.

in RL i try to spend as few time as possible on organizing my working life. i get the bills, enter them into the tax program, put them in a file and that's it. quarterly i do my turnover tax statement and put the file with the bills into a box. all letters which require a reaction go into a todo file - everything else gets into a different file and into a big box at the end of the year - which goes into the basement later. that's it. this way, all i have lying around in my office are two files and a box. when i need a letter from a year ago, i know, it's somewhat deeper in the box and search for it. this takes less time then organizing everything in different files for different senders, months or whatever - considered how seldom i need a year old letter..

but - when it comes to email i suddenly behave like 65 year old prussian bureaucrat. i have some 200 folders and subfolders in the bat, write extensive filters to move incoming mail into them and look proudly at this manic work of a psychopath. why do i do this? i have no clue! all i usually do is looking into the inbox for unread mail, read them, answer them or put a red flag on them if i want to answer them later. sometimes i need to refer to an older message, let's say a seller's message from ebay and scroll thru my 2000 pixel long folders tree until i come to business|ebay|sellers|unfinished deals. or i just press f7 and wait 10 seconds until i get 20 results which i scroll thru to find the mail from yesterday. or i take some 10 seconds more time to refine the filter to include only mails not older then 3 days old. but hell, why did i filter the mail in the first place when i now do the good old search/eye ball search thing?! obviously, something went wrong in my routine in the last years.

and then i remembered the "revolutionary" new mail client in my browser of choice, opera. incidently at the same time opera entered the 7.5er beta cycle which brought improvements for the mail client - and so i gave it a try.

what shall i say - someone in norway had the same thoughts like me. opera mail fits perfectly to the routine i describe above. it's approach is to put everything into one big box, a database obviously. a database you can index, and everyone who knows a bit about databases knows what this means to search speed. nowadays i have some filters for reoccuring types of emails (status mails from my servers, one folder for ebay and folders for mailing lists) and everything else i do with incoming mail is giving them labels (mainly todo and mail back).

all my mail but the above mentioned regulars arrives into the inbox, i read them, give them a label or just mark them read. a nice thing about the inboxis, that you can make it to "show only unread mails" so that all mails i dealed with just disappear - which is very rewarding somehow ;) (if i pressed to fast "mark as read" - no problem, ctrl-z works as it should)

when i need a mail from some time ago, i go into the big "received" folder and type a detail from the mail into the quicksearch box. with every letter i type the amount of mail shown in that windows shrinks until i find the mail i was looking for. with a drop down box with options like "show mails from this week" or "show mails from today" i can quickly refine my search. all this usually doesn't take longer than 2 seconds and i found the mail i was looking for. HEAVEN!

in the end, opera mail sacrificed a little bit of flexibility for speed and usability - that's a price I am willing to pay.

the problem with the bat and it's developers, ritlabs, is, that they never listened to their user base, nor thought about the changes in the world of email in general and, instead, implemented features without plan and vision. meanwhile, they get more and more autistic by shutting down the user forum on their website without announcement and explanation, and beside announcements of new betas almost noone is talking to their beta testers anymore. (not that they did very much in the last years anyway..)

somehow i have to say "thank you" to ritlabs - for giving me a decent mail client over years - and forcing me to think about what went wrong lately ;)