Postcards could also be one of the crucial apparent examples of Marshall McLuhan’s well-known dictum, “the medium is the message.” Regardless of what you write on one, a postcard tells somebody, hey, I used to be out and about on the planet, and I used to be considering of you.
I’m an inveterate sender of postcards. For all of the instantaneousness of in the present day’s communication choices, nothing fairly conveys a message the way in which a postcard does. Another facet I discover McLuhanesque is the hole between whenever you mail the postcard and when the particular person receives it. The card is unbiased of each sender and receiver; third events carry it to its destiny.
I additionally love electronic mail, which I’ve all the time considered the digital equal of a postcard.
While electronic mail doesn’t have the bodily limitations of a postcard (although electronic mail is equally “open” within the sense that anybody with snooping expertise can learn one in transit), there’s a shift in time between sending and receiving in each codecs. And I’d argue that the most effective emails comply with the identical format as a postcard: easy, centered messages.
Not everybody loves electronic mail, in fact, however I’m satisfied that a lot of the hate we’ve for electronic mail comes from the software program we use to work together with it. That is, electronic mail shoppers.
The know-how behind electronic mail is likely one of the longest-lasting, most-used units of protocols on the web. But whereas electronic mail know-how, just like the postcard, has stood the take a look at of time, electronic mail shoppers haven’t. They’ve been corrupted, uncared for, and relegated to the again of the category. If we’re actually going to be taught to like electronic mail once more, what we first want are higher electronic mail shoppers.
I’m not speaking about web-based electronic mail (like Gmail), the place you go to a URL and see your cloud-based inbox within the browser window. I’m speaking a few stand-alone electronic mail shopper that downloads your mail from a mail server and allows you to learn and reply out of your desktop, both in a devoted software or in an electronic mail reader that’s constructed into one other software, like an internet browser. A stand-alone electronic mail shopper provides you an identical benefits all native functions have over their web-based counterparts: velocity, grace, and offline accessibility. This kind of factor was once frequent. The Opera net browser had a built-in electronic mail shopper, and Mozilla (makers of Firefox) supported the stand-alone shopper Thunderbird. But over the previous 10 or 15 years got here a shift to web-based electronic mail, led primarily by Gmail. This transfer prompted most browsers to drop their electronic mail shoppers, and even destroyed the marketplace for some stand-alone electronic mail shoppers.
But many people by no means discovered web-based electronic mail interesting. I attempted Gmail briefly and located it a step backward. Slow to load, awkward to make use of, and insistent on making an attempt to type and arrange my inbox for me by including labels and shunting issues into separate tabs. That’s not what I need, and so I’ve all the time relied on electronic mail shoppers to fetch, show, and ship my electronic mail.
For reference, right here’s the historic timeline of my relationship with mail shopper software program: First there was Mutt, then Pine, then Eudora, then Mailsmith, then Opera, then Thunderbird. Now, I exploit a mixture of Mutt and Vivaldi Mail.
