Being minimalistic is a bad idea when you don't know what you're doing. For example, there are reasons why a link is in blue and 'call-to-action' buttons are in red (like the 'Compose' button, as in Gmail). The purpose of red is to let the user know its something 'important'. The designer of this app in question chooses to ignore these UX concepts and seems to choose beauty and aesthetics over these fundamentals and over-uses the red color (even his navbar is in full red..duh). And that's truly a bad sign for someone wanting to show themselves/their products as professional, especially when the selling point IS the UX.

Each headline being the suvject being an email with all the comments being the replies. Different users can reply in a threaded way to all the recipients of the message etc.

Obviously it would need in-line attachements and in-line pictures.

It would be interesting to allow a vote system on messages. Rather than file them, you down or up vote them. But in your box, you have more than one vote so you can apply more or less weight to info. Along with tags and groups and many other things that I can think of...

That would be cool.

If you had some sort of standard with various different native clients, then it might work.

As in Gmail?

As cookingrobot says, gmails threading is one dimensional and super clunky when you have lots of replies. It auto collapses to far so you can't easily reply to a particular message in the thread.

Reddit has the best comment threading system of any site online. Quora is near the worst. HN is just slightly frustrating.

Reddit used be written in Lisp, but they switched to Python early on: http://blog.reddit.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html

I do agree that they look alike, Hacker News was inspired by Reddit.

No one seems to get this, not HN, not Quora, Digg (though that doesn't matter any longer...)

Its about increasing the information consumption rate and navigation rate. Collapsing is critical to navigating threads with thousands of comments, even tens of comments!

Any UX designer who does not see this, is, in my book, worthless.

  > you can't reply to one person's comment

I don't know if it was there from the beginning, but I have always used rules which say "apply filter and skip inbox" effectively giving me separate folders. To each his own; I don't like kitchen-sink inbox, and like separate folders to just tagging.

For example: A error email gets sent to a development mailing list. Normally I tag all of the mailing list emails, and skip the inbox.

- What if I want the error email to stay in my inbox, but only if it's an error email?

- What if I want that email to get tagged as "ERRORS" and "DEV_LIST" and skip the Inbox?

I have to do weird filters like:

  filter #1 - if list:DEV_LIST and not subject:ERROR
              then tag w/ DEV_LIST and skip Inbox
  filter #2 - if list:DEV_LIST and subject:ERROR
              then tag w/ DEV_LIST and tag w/ ERROR

  filter #1 - if list:DEV_LIST and not subject:ERROR
              then tag w/ DEV_LIST and skip Inbox
  filter #2 - if list:DEV_LIST and subject:ERROR
              then tag w/ DEV_LIST and tag w/ ERROR and skip Inbox

But tagging allows you to have a folder-like appearance but removes to 1:1 relationship. I can have a folder of 'emails sent to me specifically' and an 'emails from my accountant' that happens to have the same message. This is super useful.

Small nit, Outlook 2003 had AutoSave. GMail was publicly introduced in 2004.

> embracing the fact that it is not truly productive to file every single e-mail into a purposeful folder

That's the "Inbox"

> embracing that tagging is better than folders.

I'm pretty sure that Outlook has had categories (the color-coded custom named things that can be multiply applied to emails) since 2000ish.

>That's the "Inbox"

In Outlook terms it's search folders.

Autosave was definitely not first in GMail. Thunderbird also allowed messages to be sorted by thread a while back (which you could argue was a rough precursor to GMail's conversation view).

I love GMail's conversation view, but AFAIK, not really many other desktop email clients have adopted it. Who else has it?

In particular, it doesn't include you or your sent mail in the conversation (http://i.imgur.com/Atkcu.png). It only lets you expand the email quotation to let you dig through nested context (http://i.imgur.com/1Zj2e.png).

Compare this to gmail (http://i.imgur.com/mLel3.png) that actually handles it as a conversation. It's one of the reasons I use Mailplane (thin wrapper around gmail) instead of Mail.app.

I use gmail, and I use Outlook and PINE and Netscape Mail and Eudora etc and I can't work out what was improved.

Threads are a sort of pre-Web 2.0 way of doing things. The messages are linked together in the tree portion of the UI but are still viewed individually in the viewing pane. They aren't stacked together like they are in a typical conversation view.

Conversations are a more modern, succinct take on what threads were trying to be.

Also, if I receive a message, reply to it and archive that thread it goes away. But if that person reply's again it brings the whole conversation back to the inbox so I can see the previous messages as well.

As someone who uses the inbox as a partial todo list that is amazing. It makes it difficult to switch from gmail, although I've been using mu4e[1] inside emacs.

[1] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html

I like being able to sort things away that I don't read often, but GMail told me I didn't want a "read untagged messages" view so it wouldn't let me do that.