Re: the introduction problem, was Email and reputation (was Re: Service outages planned for April 25)

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 5/3/22 08:55, Viktor Dukhovni wrote:

> I am not claiming that solving the UX problems is profoundly difficult,
> indeed a number of design choices can make significant progress,*but*
> no MUA I know of presently offers anything remotely close.  More
> fundamentally, I don't see any likehood of substantial effort to improve
> extant MUAs.  For example, Apple keep chipping away at*removing*
> features from Mail.app:
>
> * one can no longer compose S/MIME messages, they can only be read
> * one can no longer subscribe to just a subset IMAP folders
> * ...

In general Apple keeps making their systems more dysfunctional over 
time, while at the same time making them more expensive.  I don't know 
how to fix that.

More broadly, it's hard to get energy to improve MUAs, even though 
there's plenty of room for improvement.   MUAs are still stuck in the 1990s.

Part of the problem, I think, is that email is a _standard_ rather than 
a _product_.   Nobody has an interest in promoting email for its own sake.
And people expect email (including the MUA) to be "free".

Also, people accustomed to one email UI, don't want to change to a 
different UI, no matter how bad their existing UI is.

Keith