iMail: The email client for everyone (else)?

When I worked on Mail in the early 2000s, every incoming bug report and feature request from users was processed and tracked by me. I also provided on-the-spot Mail support for everyone in macOS engineering. I was in a unique position of knowing the things people struggled with in Mail.

I was always trying to push Mail in the direction of simplicity and higher usability, but there were always these major roadblocks:

• Email clients had worked fundamentally the same way for a very long time, so there was a LOT of resistance to change.

• Innovations that required email servers to add new functionality were dead on arrival.

So I experimented with ideas for a new email client that I dubbed “iMail“. Think of it as the email version of an app like iMovie or iPhoto. Since Apple had recently started running their own email servers as part of .Mac (now called iCloud), here was a chance for client and server to innovate together.

This never became an official project although certainly some ideas were e…