Unibox - A New Take on the OS X Mail Client

[MacRumors]

Philipp Seibel of eightloops let us know that his company was working on a fresh new take on the OS X email client. There has been a bit of a resurgence in the interest of alternative Mail clients since the launch and acquisition of Sparrow, which has left some customers abandoned.




Eightloops' new client is called Unibox and borrows a lot of organization and interface cues from chat clients like Messages. Like Messages, the interface consists of two panes: contacts on the left and messages on the right. The contact list is ordered by last received message and all emails from that contact are consolidated into that one entry:

Due to the fact that contacts only appear once in the list, many short back-and-forth emails don't clutter your inbox, they just result in moving the respective contact to the top. Another nice side effect is that notification emails from twitter, facebook, amazon etc don't spam your inbox but are limited to one entry in your contact list.

On the right side, incoming messages are displayed in a chat-like interface with incoming on the left and outgoing on the right. Outgoing messages are also written in the right hand column with support for editing, formatting, and attachments.

Meanwhile, attachments from a single contact can be viewed in a Finder-like interface. Seibel notes that this creates an interesting side effect:

Displaying attachments this way creates some interesting new views on your emails and contacts. Attachment grids of a family member or friend mostly look like shared photo albums while attachment lists of co-workers and business partners are like a shared dropbox that contains all the relevant business documents like design assets, word documents, excel sheets, etc.

Seibel wasn't willing to release full interface screenshots quite yet, but expects the app to be released this winter. They have set up a teaser page at UniboxApp.com that will notify you when the app is released. Seibel's company has been a longtime Mac developer, but has focused on contractual work in the past. This is their major independent Mac project that they've been working on for over a year.

Article Link: Unibox - A New Take on the OS X Mail Client

[Michaelgtrusa]

This is good news.

[Rudy69]

Support Hotmail (properly, not through POP3) and I will buy it..... even if it cost $49

[nutmac]

Originally Posted by Rudy69

Support Hotmail (properly, not through POP3) and I will buy it..... even if it cost $49

You can configure Hotmail via Exchange ActiveSync (Arstechnica: Windows Live Hotmail gets Exchange ActiveSync), and use Exchange clients such as Outlook or OS X Mail.

[Le Big Mac]

Originally Posted by nutmac

You can configure Hotmail via Exchange ActiveSync (Arstechnica: Windows Live Hotmail gets Exchange ActiveSync), and use Exchange clients such as Outlook or OS X Mail.

Yet, oddly, the new outlook.com email appears not to support IMAP.

[mikeorchard]

Originally Posted by nutmac

You can configure Hotmail via Exchange ActiveSync (Arstechnica: Windows Live Hotmail gets Exchange ActiveSync), and use Exchange clients such as Outlook or OS X Mail.

Exchange ActiveSync and Exchange are not the same things. The default Mail app doesn't support ActiveSync and neither does Outlook 2011 for Mac. POP3 is the only way to access Hotmail/Outlook.com mail accounts on OS X. Considering that my iPhone supports ActiveSync, I don't know why Apple can't make OS X Mail, Calender and Contacts support it too.

[tigres]

Vaporware?

announced too soon? was looking forward to trying this.

[Kilamite]

Originally Posted by Rudy69

Support Hotmail (properly, not through POP3) and I will buy it..... even if it cost $49

Hotmail? People still use that?

[verniesgarden]

Originally Posted by Kilamite

Hotmail? People still use that?

the new hotmail (now outlook) is really nice... like arguably better than gmail nice.

[anubis72]

Sounds like Vaporware to me. Spur early interest, disappear forever in 2 months...

[Sayer]

I wish it could do Corporate Exchange email. I constantly send/get emails from a small group of people I am working on a project with, and also get a lot of "status" emails from automated systems and such that clutter my inbox.

I had 30 emails in my Inbox this morning, all sent today. And I have probably received as many since then so far today.

The Mail.app in Lion keeps a lot of the email threds grouped up, but it's still cumbersome and occasionally someone will send a reply to the thread with a completely different context and it gets lumped in with everything else.

Seems the intent is more of a personal email client than a business-orientated one. Oh well.

[OriginalMacRat]

Originally Posted by Kilamite

Hotmail? People still use that?

Scary, isn't it?

[Rudy69]

Originally Posted by Kilamite

Hotmail? People still use that?

I've had my account since 97, changing it now would be a hassle

[philr5150]

I'm asking this question out of genuine interest, I don't want to start a flame war or anything </disclaimer>

I work as an Email admin for a moderately large company, so I do understand email and the technologies involved. I'm interested to know why, for people who use email clients, why you like using clients rather than the web-based front ends or services. Is it because via the browser you miss key/important features? Work in areas with poor connectivity? Need offline functionality? Does the front end web interface just plain suck?

Again, NOT wanting to start arguments or a "this is better than that" thing - just very interested in how or why people use actual mail clients.

[Gemütlichkeit]

Originally Posted by Rudy69

I've had my account since 97, changing it now would be a hassle

i have my hotmail and gmail accounts forward to one of my @me.com aliases. Consolidating down all emails accounts to 1 is a worthwhile undertaking.

[Kar98]

Originally Posted by Kilamite

Hotmail? People still use that?

Hell yeah. Not for e-mail though. Free 25 GB SkyDrive = better than Dropbox and iCloud combined.

[cvaldes]

Originally Posted by Kilamite

Hotmail? People still use that?

Hell yeah.

Not for legitimate communications though. It's my junk mail inbox. You know, when you need to give an e-mail address to sign up for some contest or participate in an Internet forum. That's about the only time. I can easily go six months without logging into Hotmail and I certainly won't let my standalone mail client grab messages from the Hotmail servers.

It was funnier when Hotmail had a atrociously pathetic 2MB storage limit. Send your Hotmail account a 1.9MB attachment then have it bounce back messages.

For me, that's the real value of webmail: accessing certain mail accounts that are meant for junk and spam that I wouldn't want to normally access.

[coder12]

Originally Posted by Kilamite

Hotmail? People still use that?

I thought only teenage girls used that.

[I WAS the one]

Apple needs a better Mail client or a Pro version of the same. I switch to Post box and BOY I'm glad! http://www.postbox-inc.com

[roadbloc]

Another mail client to be bought by everyone before Google gets its hands on it eh?

[bradhs]

I also need true hotmail support and found an amazing app called mBox. It basically manages communications between Hotmail and Mac Mail. To Mac Mail is just looks like IMAP. Crazy and amazing!!

http://fluentfactory.com/mboxmail-for-mac/

Oh, first time I installed it it took up a crap load of memory and CPU. After it grabs and syncs all the data it will return to normal after a reboot.

Originally Posted by Rudy69

Support Hotmail (properly, not through POP3) and I will buy it..... even if it cost $49

[rufwork]

Originally Posted by Rudy69

Support Hotmail (properly, not through POP3) and I will buy it..... even if it cost $49

Hotmail doesn't support IMAP, and Exchange isn't exactly an open standard. If you're stuck on Hotmail, even with the very impressive Outlook.com overhaul, you're going to be limited to a pretty small set of clients if you won't take POP3.

Thunderbird has a couple of plugins that try to do Exchange, but are buggy, and Evolution (Exchange compatible client on Linux) has issues too.

I think someone could do a great stand-alone client for hotmail, but it'd have to do its own cloud support.

[kristoffer4]

There is also http://dotmailapp.com/ which also looks very interesting!
I hope the search is just as good as Sparrow. That is one of the best in Sparrow.

[stiligFox]

Color me interested! It almost sounds a bit nicer than Sparrow if it works like it sounds it does

[jessica.]

Sounds interesting but it seems so early to be teasing us.