Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum, "the medium is the message" can be seen in postcards. A postcard tells someone that you were out and about in the world and that you were thinking of them.
I send postcards. There is nothing quite like a postcard to convey a message. There is a gap between when you mail the postcard and when the person gets it. The card is not owned by either sender or receiver.
I think email is the same as a postcard.
While email doesn't have the physical limitations of a postcard, there is a change in time between sending and receiving in both formats. Simple, focused messages are what the best emails follow.
The software we use to interact with email is what makes us dislike it the most. Email clients.
Better email clients are what we need if we want to love email again.
Email is one of the oldest and most used protocols on the internet. Email clients have not stood the test of time. They have been demoted to the back of the class. Better email clients are what we need if we want to love email again.
I am not talking about web-based email where you visit a URL and see your email in the browser window. A stand-alone email client that downloads your mail from a mail server and lets you read and respond from your desktop is what I am talking about. The advantages of a stand-alone email client are the same as those of a native application. It used to be common. The Opera web browser had a built in email client. The shift to web-based email was led by Gmail. The market for stand-alone email clients was destroyed when most browsers dropped their email clients.
Many of us didn't find web-based email attractive. I tried to use Gmail, but it didn't work. Slow to load, awkward to use, and insist on trying to sort and organize my inbox by putting things in different tabs. I have always relied on email clients to fetch, display, and send my email.
The history of my relationship with mail client software is shown here. I use a combination of two mail services.
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