nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Email with ‘views’ not ‘folders’.

More and more I’m finding myself wanting an email client which doesn’t have folders for sorting things, but instead has ‘views’. That is, everything goes into one giant bucket and where one would normally find folders there are what amount to canned search queries. For example, ‘LJ’ for all things from LiveJournal, or maybe ‘Honda’, for all messages which contain the string Honda.

Still having folders available would be good for some, but I’m not sure I’d use it.

I’m fairly certain newer versions of Outlook almost meet all these requirements… But why not Mail.app or some other simpler mail client?

< sigh >

8 Responses

  1. eternalmaiden July 30, 2006

    Gmail does that with a small amount of configuration. Are you opposed to Gmail (or is it web-based email?) at all?

    1. c0nsumer July 30, 2006

      Gmail isn’t mine, that’s the problem. I can’t throw all my current mail into it… Additionally, I don’t control the mail server nor the addresses used there.

      1. atdt1991 July 30, 2006

        Some of those items are addressed here: https://www.google.com/hosted/

        1. c0nsumer July 30, 2006

          My biggest concern with that is handing email content over to a third party. Although I guess I already do that by having a hosted domain…

          I may set up a test account with one of my test domains.

  2. itsthejohnes July 30, 2006

    Eudora now has the “instant search” feature

    I guess in a sense, you could dump all emails into a giant folder and search for everything instead of categorizing it?

  3. mcneight July 30, 2006

    Mail.app does have this. They are called “Smart Mailboxes”, and they’ll automatically pattern match from all of your mail folders and across servers.

    1. c0nsumer July 30, 2006

      Oh. How did I forget about that? Heh.

      Thank you. Maybe I shouldn’t write such things when so tired…

  4. PINE, BABY, PINE

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