Why would I want to put my cloud in the cloud?

Ever since Spar­row Mail went the way of the dodo,¹ the search for a good email client has been on. Spar­row con­tin­ues to work, but it nev­er ful­ly matured as an email client and will nev­er again be sup­port­ed. Spar­row there­fore is not a good long-term option. I still use Spar­row on my lap­top and on my iPhone, but I’ve moved back to Apple’s Mail.app on my desk­top sys­tem. Mail.app’s inter­face has improved sub­stan­tial­ly in the time I was using Spar­row, but it has also intro­duced annoy­ing new bugs (select more than a half-dozen emails and right-click to delete or mark those mes­sages as read? pre­pare to spend five min­utes watch­ing the spin­ning beach­ball of death) and is miss­ing a fea­ture that made Spar­row com­pelling: Spar­row allows hid­ing the mes­sage dis­play pane entire­ly. This is very handy when delet­ing spam — I don’t want to have to look at a Via­gra or porn ad in order to delete it, thank you very much. If I want­ed to look at it, I prob­a­bly would­n’t be delet­ing it.

Spar­row was so well-designed that email clients on all plat­forms are being com­pared to Spar­row. Jeff Atwood’s recent glow­ing review of the Microsoft Sur­face tablet’s only com­plaint was with the mail client — he wrote, «If Microsoft does­n’t get their A Team “hey dum­mies, all you have to do is just copy Spar­row already” team on that soon, they’ll be sor­ry.» Else­where around the Web there are ref­er­ences to «Spar­row-like fea­tures» and design «bor­rowed from Spar­row.» Android blogs are already com­plain­ing that the new iOS Gmail app isn’t yet avail­able for Android. What does Gmail’s iOS app have to do with Spar­row? Matthew Izatt, the Gmail app prod­uct man­ag­er, begins the announce­ment for the new app by say­ing, «Six months ago, our team set out to com­plete­ly rebuild the Gmail app for iPhone and iPad». Six months back from the announce­ment would have been June. In July, Spar­row announced it had been acquired by Google and that the team would be absorbed into the Gmail team. It’s hard to look at the advance­ments in Gmail’s IOS user inter­face and not see Spar­row’s influence.

So this is good news, right? Because Spar­row (sort of) lives on, and great email expe­ri­ence can be had by all. Well, not quite. First, there is no desk­top ver­sion. Sec­ond, as pre­dict­ed, the new Gmail app that looks just like Spar­row is only for Gmail. It can­not be used to access accounts from oth­er providers.

True, you can tell Gmail to down­load all of your mail from anoth­er provider and there­by use the Gmail app to access your mail, and even send mail from a non-Gmail address. That means giv­ing Google the pass­word to your non-Gmail email account and let­ting every word of every email get passed through Google’s servers where it can be ana­lyzed to fig­ure out what kinds of ads you’ll respond best to.

Even I don’t real­ly care about the prac­ti­cal issue so much as the cen­tral­iza­tion and depen­den­cy Google is try­ing to cre­ate. And that does­n’t both­er me as much as the fact that run­ning your mail from one serv­er to anoth­er serv­er so that you can use a mail client that only works with that serv­er is stu­pid. No one would ever use Microsoft Out­look if the only thing it would do is get mail from Hot­mail.²

This brings me to my real com­plaint. In search­ing for a replace­ment for Spar­row, I’ve come across sev­er­al email clients that look like they have good user inter­faces and/or good ideas about han­dling or pro­cess­ing email. Almost none of them are stand­alone email apps. They are web-based ser­vices that access your email accounts so that the desk­top appli­ca­tion can access the web-based ser­vices. And you get to pay a month­ly fee for the privilege.

I’m sor­ry, but I can­not for the life of me think of a sin­gle rea­son I’d want to access my email «in the cloud.» My email is on an IMAP serv­er; it’s essen­tial­ly already in the cloud. What pos­si­ble advan­tage can I gain from let­ting some third-par­ty com­pa­ny have my email pass­words so that they can hand me my own emails? I don’t care how good your fan­cy user inter­face is; if I want to throw my pri­va­cy into the waste­bin, I’m at least going to do it with an enor­mous com­pa­ny like Google.

So, here are the absolute min­i­mum require­ments for an email client:

1. Must work with any provider’s POP or IMAP serv­er. (OK heck, just IMAP. Who uses POP in the 21^st Cen­tu­ry anyhow?)
2. Must have a native client for the oper­at­ing sys­tem on which it runs
3. Must not require any sub­scrip­tion to any ser­vice oth­er than an Inter­net con­nec­tion and a mailserver.
4. …?

And here is a list of email appli­ca­tions that have sim­ply failed to deliv­er on this set of requirements:

• MailPi­lot (It’s a cloud service.)
• Smak (It’s a cloud service.)
• NextBox (In fair­ness, I can’t see any evi­dence that NextBox even exists. They want us to «share» how much we love their appli­ca­tion but oth­er than a sin­gle screen­shot there is noth­ing to love. Per­haps some­day there will be an appli­ca­tion that meets the above requirements.)
• TaskBox (which looks promis­ing, but only works with Gmail.)
• Inky (It’s a cloud service.)
• MailPlane (Gmail-only and as far as I can tell is the Gmail web­site in an appli­ca­tion wrapper.)

Final­ly, I ought to men­tion that there are sev­er­al Mac email appli­ca­tions out there that do meet the above cri­te­ria. Despite hav­ing some very vocal pro­po­nents who claim each is the sec­ond com­ing of email, I haven’t found any of these to be an improve­ment over Apple’s Mail.app for my pur­pos­es. How­ev­er, I’m glad to link to these because they are worth trying.

• Post­box (Drop­box sup­port to replace file attach­ments is a nice feature.)
• Mail­Mate (A great app for the sort of per­son that would rather write their own mail application.)
• Thun­der­bird (Meh. I did­n’t care for Netscape Mail twelve years ago and Thun­der­bird has­n’t changed much since.)
• Out­look (I’ve nev­er liked Out­look on the PC so I’m not inclined to pay $200 to see whether I hate it on the Mac too.)

So for the moment I’m still going back and forth between Spar­row and Mail.app. But I’ll end my post on this inter­est­ing note: a soon-to-be-released mail app for Win­dows called Mail­bird looks a lot like Spar­row. If Google’s plan in buy­ing Spar­row was to make Apple prod­ucts look less attrac­tive, it’s work­ing. I’m not to the point where I’d switch to Win­dows for a mail app, but I’ll seri­ous­ly con­sid­er whether to run Mail­bird in virtualization.