The Internet’s oldest software application, the email client, could be better.

I find Google Gmail the best for my own workflow, but it is ripe with complexity and user experience issues.

Well over an five hour ago I emptied from trash a huge amount of email. Since then I couldn’t log back in till just now:

Text copy:

Temporary Error (500)

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.

If the issue persists, please visit the Gmail Help Center »

Try Again Sign Out

This happens to a lesser extend every time I delete a large number of emails. I understand Google doesn’t like deleting things — they want to to organize the world’s information — but every time it leaves me upset.

Space and search are Gmail’s killerest feature, so it shouldn’t be unexpected that people would use it as a temporary data store of huge amounts of information.. Here I am trying to make excuses for them. It’s unacceptable that any action can take your email down for hours.

I recently tried Thunderbird 3– I really want to love it — but felt like I was in configuration hell. It would have taken days to get it as usable as Gmail already is for me.

A lot of colleagues and friends get a lot of milage from Apple Mail, but Mark Pilgrim’s “Juggling Oranges” rings in my ears. The articles describes Mark walking away from Mac for an completely open source stack, “Mail.app 2.0 helpfully auto-converted all my wonderful mbox files into Apple’s shitty undocumented format. ”

Why is individual emails still the focus on email? Instead of bigger picture collaboration with people?

Anyone dreaming of the fabled open source Mac mail client Letters.app? Synovel Spicebird looks intriguing.