Webmail is way too ubiquitous for desktop email software to be worth the million dollars a year it costs to hire five bay-area software developers to build and maintain it. I imagine Dropbox would have kept it around if it saw more user traction, but it didn't.
Inbox by GMail has some of the ideas from the Sparrow team incorporated in it, but it's only really usable on mobile. (The desktop Inbox web app is awfully slow compared to, say, GMail or Outlook.com.)
When Hotmail came out, who still paid for Eudora licenses?
That said, if a decent email client is that important to you, don't underestimate the impact you could have building it yourself as open source on evenings and weekends. And if you don't think it's worth your time to do that much, why would you expect anyone else to?
HotMaiL didn't make a dent in Eudora market share. What killed Eudora was Outlook Express, bundled with the operating system for free. Incidentally, the same strategy was used against Netscape (who then proceeded to quickly kill itself when faced with that prospect).
> And if you don't think it's worth your time to do that much, why would you expect anyone else to?
I don't expect anyone else to build me a FOSS email client. I do expect that by 2015 somebody would have figured out a way for me to give them money for a good email experience. :)
I did expect that by 2015 somebody would have figured out a way to make a decent kettle that lasts a lifetime, or a similarly decent fridge, or washing machine, or even a watch. Sadly, I was disappointed.
If you own something, you're not buying it - so the seller doesn't get the money. Software figured this out quickly - that's why everything that has not moved to cloud yet is being sold in form of licenses - a temporary grant to use some software. Rest of the world did it with planned obsolescence, and now the trend is to actually make you license hardware instead of buying it. It's sick. But that's where the money is, that's what the Market[0] says to do, therefore it's happening.
There's a difference - software also has unplanned obsolescence. For instance, I've been working on a non-profit website that has a fair amount of QuickTime video from way back when that was a good choice. If you don't do something about it, it won't play anymore on modern browsers. It's hard to align the interests of software developers with the interests of customers using a one-time purchase, but with work that continues indefinitely. Appliances are different since I don't need their features to change long after the sale. In this case, if they can charge me more at the time of the sale for an appliance that lasts longer, we can align interests.
- Open Mail, roughly time how long it takes from left pane click to message fully rendered on the right (~2-3 seconds)
- Open Dropbox (fast before it goes away!) and do the same (~250ms)
I get roughly 100-150 emails overnight that I go through in the morning. At 2-3 seconds PER THREAD render this is insanely unproductive use of my time.
Every time I open OSX Mail I have this exact process in my head and I promptly close it.
Not sure what's happening with your setup. For me it's nearly instant. Some long long threads or heavy HTML can be up to about 800ms.
I'm also talking about my iOS experience. There are some perf issues that would be nice, but for me that's mostly in search and initial sync than stuff that's already downloaded.
Inbox by GMail has some of the ideas from the Sparrow team incorporated in it, but it's only really usable on mobile. (The desktop Inbox web app is awfully slow compared to, say, GMail or Outlook.com.)
When Hotmail came out, who still paid for Eudora licenses?
That said, if a decent email client is that important to you, don't underestimate the impact you could have building it yourself as open source on evenings and weekends. And if you don't think it's worth your time to do that much, why would you expect anyone else to?