Email Doesn’t Suck. It’s Email Clients That Need Improving

Don’t hate the technology, hate the implementation.

Postcards may be one of the most obvious examples of Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum, “the medium is the message.” Regardless of what you write on one, a postcard tells someone, hey, I was out and about in the world, and I was thinking of you.

I am an inveterate sender of postcards. For all the instantaneousness of today’s communication options, nothing quite conveys a message the way a postcard does. Another aspect I find McLuhanesque is the gap between when you mail the postcard and when the person receives it. The card is independent of both sender and receiver; third parties carry it to its fate.

I also love email, which I’ve always thought of as the digital equivalent of a postcard.

While email doesn’t have the physical limitations of a postcard (though email is similarly “open” in the sense that anyone with snooping skills can read one in transit), there is a shift in time between sending and receiving in both formats. And I would argue that the best emails follow the same format as a postcard: simple, focused messages.

Not everyone loves email, of course, but I am convinced that much of the dislike we have for email comes from the software we use to interact with it.

That is, email clients.

If we’re really going to learn to love email again, what we first need are better email clients.

The technology behind email is one of the longest-lasting, most-used sets of protocols on the internet. But while email technology, like the postcard, has stood the test of time, email clients have not. They’ve been corrupted, neglected, and relegated to the back of the class. If we’re really going to learn to love email again, what we first need are better email clients.

I’m not talking about web-based email (like Gmail), where you visit a URL and see your cloud-based inbox in the browser window. I’m talking about a stand-alone email client that downloads your mail from a mail server and lets you read and respond from your desktop, either in a dedicated application or in an email reader that’s built into another application, like a web browser. A stand-alone email client gives you the same advantages all native applications have over their web-based counterparts: speed, grace, and offline accessibility. This type of thing used to be common. The Opera web browser had a built-in email client, and Mozilla (makers of Firefox) supported the stand-alone client Thunderbird. But over the past 10 or 15 years came a shift to web-based email, led primarily by Gmail. This move prompted most browsers to drop their email clients, and even destroyed the market for some stand-alone email clients.

But many of us never found web-based email appealing. I tried Gmail briefly and found it a step backward. Slow to load, awkward to use, and insistent on trying to sort and organize my inbox for me by adding labels and shunting things into separate tabs. That’s not what I want, and so I have always relied on email clients to fetch, display, and send my email.

For reference, here’s the historical timeline of my relationship with mail client software: First there was Mutt, then Pine, then Eudora, then Mailsmith, then Opera, then Thunderbird. Now, I use a combination of Mutt and Vivaldi Mail.

Mutt is a console-based mail client that was first released in the mid-1990s. It loads in a text-only window and is controlled with keyboard commands.

That might sound anachronistic, but I believe Mutt is the main reason I still like email. All it does is display plain text. Those ridiculous signatures and disclaimers people put at the bottom of their emails? I don’t see them. Images? I open those separately, and only when I want to. The tracking pixels people sneak into emails to see whether I’ve read their message? Nope. Mutt keeps things simple and concise. It’s the back of the postcard, the meat of the message, and nothing else. Mutt also renders the text instantly; unlike Gmail or other web-based options, there’s no waiting for the message to load.
Unfortunately, there are people who believe that email should include formatting, special fonts, inline images, and all kinds of junk. Most of those emails I delete. But there are some I have to deal with–banking notifications, receipts for online purchases, calendar notifications, and other things I can’t just trash. For those emails, and as an extra backup, I’ve been using Vivaldi’s Mail client since it was released as a beta last year.

Singing a New Song

The Vivaldi web browser, which I have previously called the web’s best browser for its customization options and user-first design, recently started building an email client into the browser. I recommend checking it out if your relationship with email is ... not good.

Vivaldi Mail looks a lot like a web-based email client. The mail interface opens in a browser tab, and there are a variety of layouts to choose from, including some that look just like popular web-based interfaces. But it's not web-based email; Vivaldi is downloading your mail to your computer and giving you a nice, elegant tool for managing it that happens to live inside a browser tab.

Vivaldi’s mail client is aimed at a much wider audience than text-only Mutt. It includes all the features you’d expect in a modern mail client, including the ability to render HTML email and even create it. Though of course I would urge you to not inject HTML into your emails and to step away from the font selection tools. (Remember: postcard, simple.) Vivaldi offers a setting to render everything as text and compose everything as text. Find that setting and use it.

The other thing I highly suggest you do with Vivaldi’s Mail client—and every other client you use—is to turn off all the notifications and badges. The mail carrier doesn’t come up to your window and flick postcards in your face, so don’t let your mail client do that to you. In Vivaldi, both notifications and badges are unfortunately enabled by default. I can’t fault Vivaldi for that, the world being what it is. Just know that there is a setting to control notifications and badges, and you should turn both off. Check your email when you feel like it, not when a notification badge agitates your serotonin level past the point of resistance.

In addition to fetching and displaying your email, Vivaldi Mail will store your messages locally so you can search your inbox for hotel reservations or meeting details even when you’re offline. You can also compose messages while you’re offline and queue them to send later, when you connect again.

And you can filter messages that match rules you define, and then save those rules as folders, just as you would in Gmail. For example, I have a personal address and work address, so I created a filter to label all my work emails “work,” and then I can view mail by label, so all work-related email stays separate from personal even though both are actually stored in the same inbox. Vivaldi also supports labels, including any you’ve already created in other clients, like Thunderbird and Apple Mail, so if you’re migrating you won’t lose your existing organization system.

There are also plenty of features you’ll recognize from popular web-based applications: calendar integration, an RSS reader, keyboard shortcuts.

But the biggest win with stand-alone mail clients is that you can make them work the way you want. Most email clients, especially web-based clients like Gmail, have a workflow in mind. If it’s not your workflow, too bad. You can bend them a little bit, but you never really get the freedom to use them the way you want. Vivaldi Mail has some sensible defaults, but just like the web browser it lives inside of, the settings are fully customizable.

This is the first step in improving your productivity—establishing a software workflow that conforms to your brain’s specific contours.

The next step is remembering that you are sending postcards, not colorful flyers or busy magazines. You are not writing novels, or even essays. Go back to sending postcards. And use a good email client to do it.

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