The Goldfish Chronicles

Having a blogging night it seems.

I use Gmail for non-authoritative email - that is, lots and lots of mailing lists. Maybe 65 or so at a quick random count. 1.2G used out of 2.7G. At some point I’ll run out of space, or Google might continue to expand it. However, those numbers are very tiny. My private email has 350M used with 60G left.

The interface isn’t very good. It insists on experimenting with tags when folders already work damn well - yes tagging is cool, switch your file system from a hierarchical system to a tagged one and let me know how it goes. It’s crap at deleting - I have to delete in blocks of 100 and then I have to really delete in blocks of 100 from the trash. It’s slow, fast for a web user interface, but slow for something actually on my machine. It’s big and heavy on the browser - which I suspect means that it finds memory bugs quicker, they seem to die more often.

I moved to Gmail because visualizing those many mailing lists was getting hard to do in pine. I don’t want to trawl through the lists reading every mail, I just want to scan the subjects and pick the ones I like. All this suggests that I might need other options - news client software via NNTP using gmane.org; though I wonder if I’m going to find something with the bits I’ve gotten used to in Gmail, starring conversations is a good idea, though it doesn’t seem to work well enough in Gmail - simply because the menu option doesn’t show that there are unread emails in the Starred label.

Another option is the forum approach. Nabble.com is an option there, but it has bits missing; I can’t delete entries, setup filters to delete entries, it has a rating system when I want a star/bookmark system - I don’t care about telling other people what the interesting options are, I want to manage them as if I owned them. In reality I doubt it would delete them, rather it would just delete the pointer in my account etc etc. I doubt if it saves the messages I sent specially (though that would be easy to add), but most importantly, I can’t email forward entries to other addresses, reply privately or cross-post - the things I’d want from an email client.

So what do I want? I want a mailing list client. Something that speaks email, but is prepared to step back and view things from afar. Filter based on [xxx], collate certain emails into periodic reports, let me mark threads as ignorable, alert me when a thread changes, definitely alert me if my name appears (or other chosen search terms), and when I email a list, it uses the user who is subscribed to that list - I won’t have to choose.

Now, I ask you. Is that too much to ask?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 4th, 2006 at 12:19 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.