.mail app

First thing I thought of when I read the heading Actionsteps was being able to tailor actions specific to each email. For instance, you receive an email from Twitter saying someone's following you, and you're given the options to either "follow", "@reply", "ignore", etc, and similarly for Facebook. Receive a bill from ATT and your next steps are "pay bill", "file as important", "put on to-do."

You're essentially containing all of the work necessary to resolve the subject of the email within the client itself. You could allow for app plugins/extensions so that others could develop hooks into various services.

Other than that, it looks clean and simple. I'm eager to try it out when it's launched.

I like most of this but Gmail's tagging has been so burdensome and then hard to use the results of such that I've given up on it entirely.

I like being able to sort things away that I don't read often, but GMail told me I didn't want a "read untagged messages" view so it wouldn't let me do that.

Whoo boy does that site ever not work without javascript... Sort of ridiculous since it's a static page advertising a desktop app, neither of which should require javascript at all.

EDIT: Oh God, and hot pink highlighting does NOT complement their color scheme. And for all its javascript fanciness, it doesn't handle resizing at all. Sorry to be so negative, this site just pushes all my buttons.

A bone to pick with the name: Leading "." in filenames usually causes the Finder (and ls) to omit the files in listings.

Maybe not a great look for an email app.

From the video: "Our servers store metadata about your messages, but not the messages themselves"

It's difficult for me to invest the time (and effort) required to use a service like this, when that investment could easily just go away when the service is pulled for whatever reason. Or, if their servers are down will I have robust access to my mail client?

One of the nice things about old email is that it is portable. Metadata on 3rd party servers seems to cast this positive aspect about email aside.

Some aspects of these new emerging services are novel, specifically the UI and layout of features. As many have pointed out recently, similar functionality has existed in mail clients for years. However, not every email user is aware that their use of email could be made more productive just by utilizing the tools already in their email environment. I would guess these mail client-services are catering to that market -- the less technically inclined. Consequently, these customers are less likely to know or care about the implications of spreading vital work-related or important data across new and potentially volatile services.

That said, I do support nice-looking and more usable email clients, just not at the cost of dependence on a 3rd party service.