[geeks] Thoughts on email clients in general.

[Joshua D Boyd]

I've been thinking that the traditional design of email clients the
past few years is sub-optimal.

Specifically, I mean the traditional panelled view where one panel is
the list of folders, one panel is the list of messages in the mailbox,
and one panel is the message itself. 

At a minimum, I want to get rid of the seperate folder and message
header views.  So, for this change, the mail client would have a
mailbox panel and a message panel.  The message panel would look the
same as always.

The mailbox panel would be a single tree control (preferably one that
allows rather advanced formatting).  The top level node would be say
my username.  Below that would be a list of my
folders/sortgroups/etc.  Expanding a folder shows a list of subjects.
Expanding a subject shoulds a threaded list of authors on that
subject.  

Within that framework for the mailbox panel, there is a whole world of
experimenting that could be done.  In particular, I think that the
second level of it shouldn't be a direct reflection of how the data is
stored, and I think that at any point in the tree, one should be able
to add a new node that collects messages under it based on certain
rules.

A further refinement of this plan that I'd like to try would be to do
away with the seperate panels alltogether and just put the message
text directly into the tree.

Man, I really wish I had more free time to work on this.  I wonder if
I could sell it.  Probably not unless it was fully exchange compatible
and/or offered a backend replacement for exchange.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd