Features I need in an e-mail client

Giles Turnbull forwarded on O'Reilly's Mac DevCenter Blog a request by Kiwi's developer Matt Ronge for some features people want in their e-mail client.

Well, so here is a small listing of features I'd need before I switch anywhere from Thunderbird:

  • Support for HTTP/HTTPS and Socks5 proxies (thanks to ISP restrictions)

  • Better conversation support compared to Thunderbird esp. for mailing lists (actually something like on gmail would be nice)

  • Full-text indexing or at least tagging

  • Plain-old POP3 support as long as gmail doesn't offer SMTP ;)

  • Growl

  • An open storage system

I think this should be it. For me esp. Socks5 and general proxy support is very important considering that this was also the main reason why I never could really try out Apple's Mail.app. You might notice, that I don't list a spam filter. I started deleting any mail I'm not interested in anyway, so spam filtering is something that I could entrust the server with ;) Sure, spam filtering is nice, but there are already enough frameworks out there. Perhaps some interface to some of them would be nice.

Honestly, I really like the idea behind Kiwi, offering a basic client and let out people implement whatever they want on top of it. I'm actually quite curious how this will work out esp. considering a performance comparison between Lua and JavaScript (as the Mozilla Foundation uses it for their extensible frameworks). The whole thing might really get nice :D