Philosophy.txt

Should an email client have a philosophy? For many people, email is
one of our primary means of communication, and email archives are an
integral part of our long-term memory. Something so important ought to
warrant a little thought.

Here's Sup's philosophy.

Using "traditional" email clients today is increasingly problematic.
Anyone who's on a high-traffic mailing list knows this. My ruby-talk
folder is 430 megs and Mutt sits there for 60 seconds while it opens
it. Keeping up with the all the new traffic is impossible, even with
Mutt's excellent threading features, simply because there's so much of
it. A single thread can span several pages in the folder index view
alone! And Mutt is probably the fastest, most mailing-list aware email
client out there. God help me if I try and use Thunderbird.

The problem with traditional clients like Mutt is that they deal with
individual pieces of email. This places a high mental cost on the user
for each incoming email, by forcing them to ask: Should I keep this
email, or delete it? If I keep it, where should I file it? I've spent
the last 10 years of my life laboriously hand-filing every email
message I received and feeling a mild sense of panic every time an
email was both "from Mom" and "about school". The massive amounts of
email that many people receive, and the cheap cost of storage, have
made these questions both more costly and less useful to answer.

Contrast that with using Gmail. As a long-time Mutt user, I was blown
away when I first saw someone use Gmail. They treated their email
differently from how I ever had. They never filed email and they never
deleted it. They relied on an immediate, global, full-text search, and
thread-level tagging, to do everything I'd ever done with Mutt, but
with a trivial cost to the user at message receipt time.

From Gmail I learned that making certain operations quantitatively
easier (namely, search) resulted in a qualitative improvement in
usage. I also learned how thread-centrism was advantageous over
message-centrism when message volume was high: most of the time, a
message and its context deserve the same treatment. I think it's to
the Gmail designers' credit that they started with a somewhat ad-hoc
idea (hey, we're really good at search engines, so maybe we can build
an email client on top of one) and managed to build something that was
actually better than everything else out there. At least, that's how I
imagine in happened. Maybe they knew what they were doing from the
start.

Unfortunately, there's a lot to Gmail I can't tolerate (top posting,
HTML mail, one-level threads, and ads come to mind, never mind the
fact that it's not FOSS). Thus Sup was born.

Sup is based on the following principles, which I stole directly from
Gmail:

- An immediately accessible and fast search capability over the entire
  email archive eliminates most of the need for folders, and most of
  the necessity of deleting email.

- Labels eliminate what little need for folders search doesn't cover.

- A thread-centric approach to the UI is much more in line with how
  people operate than dealing with individual messages is. In the vast
  majority of cases, a message and its context should be subject to
  the same treatment.

Sup is also based on many ideas from mutt and Emacs and vi, having to
do with the fantastic productivity of a console- and keyboard-based
application, the usefulness of multiple buffers, the necessity of
handling multiple email accounts, etc. But those are just details!

Try it and let me know what you think.