Here it is. Part 2 of an ongoing series of editorials written by David Reid himself. This time he focuses on what his probably the most widely used feature of the Internet, e-mail.

So read on, for what he has to say...

Cynic's Soapbox: Part 2.
by David Reid.

There are some questions that don't have a sensible answer. They tend to be questions that depend on too many variables and the only good response is a question. One of these questions that I get asked from time to time is "What computer should I buy?" My response has changed over the years but is normally "What do you want to do with it?" these days. As you're no doubt sat in front of a computer reading this, why not take a few moments to answer? What do you actually do with your computer?

Though not a gambler at heart I'm willing to bet that if you were being honest most of you will have included email in your answer. Email is the one use that almost every computer I've come across in the last couple of years has been put to, and for many people it's what they use most. It's such a wonderfully simple concept. Fast, efficient and most importantly simple to use.

Ideally I'd like to be able to get my email, from wherever it's stored, using whatever protocol I need, and have the messages available on my system. It shouldn't matter what application I use to look at the messages. I should be able to use one application to view messages, another to write a reply - all using the same address list. That ideal seems to tie in with the basic simplicity of email, and yet it's an ideal that so far only Be have tried to create. You certainly can't do it on Windows. Be's approach for email was typically different and ahead of it's time. Finally the problems with address books and message formats would disappear! Or would they?

The email implementation supplied with BeOS R5 is seriously flawed. When I first installed BeOS R5 it worked for simple email setups, but when asked to perform more difficult or complex operations things started to go wrong. 5 years ago the spread of email and the Internet wasn't as all encompassing and the relative simplicity of the Be offering could be forgiven. Email today is no longer simple.

While doing some coding in BeOS R5 a few months ago I needed to send an email. Not paying 100% attention I wrote it and then sent it, forgetting that the naive Be setup would try to send and receive mail, using POP3 on my IMAP mail account! The result was sadly inevitable. Ever since I've given up even trying to use BeOS R5's email. Simple options such as being able to leave email on the server, send but not receive, imap and authentication options for smtp are missing. When trying to use more than one account the messages end up intermingled in the single inbox provided and there isn't an easy way of adding a filter to correct this. The lack of filtering also means I can't employ anti-spam offerings.

Why is email so important? Quite simply it's one of the "killer apps" that will make or break an operating system. Windows XP installs with a web browser and email client "out of the box" and the fact that both are easy to setup and use is a huge bonus. (You could argue that Be led the way with that strategy as they were bundling Net+ and BeMail before Microsoft started, but that's a different debate.) In comparison with many of the features BeOS R5 offered email seems to have been sadly neglected. While other applications became better and more supported email didn't get it's much needed makeover. When you consider that more people will use the email features than probably any other, the decision to not keep upgrading seems strange.

The challenge facing yellowTab and OpenBeOS is to bring Be's concepts up to date and make them usable today. This has been made slightly easier thanks to the work done by Bruno Albuquerque and his merry band of coders on a replacement for the original Be mail daemon. This is a good start and it looks certain that both groups will use it. This corrects many of the problems of the original, but still it doesn't make using email on BeOS as easy and intuitive as it should be. Given that history has a habit of repeating itself I'd suggest though that both groups give some serious thought to how the user interacts with the mail once collected. Simply recreating BeMail isn't going to be enough and would represent not only a missed opportunity but an own goal.

Mail-Daemon Replacement link.