As discussed yesterday, I’m a fan of tabbed interfaces. The only application I use with regularity that isn’t tabbed is my e-mail client. I don’t like using any type of three-pane view for e-mail, instead I open each message in a new window in Mail.app and Thunderbird1.
Perhaps because of my style of mail client usage, I’d love to have a tabbed e-mail client. Composing new e-mails, reading e-mails, even viewing message lists in folders could all be done in new tabs.
I installed RoundCube Webmail recently, and I’m quite impressed. Soon, this will be the #1 choice for self-hosted web mail systems, hands down – it’s gorgeous. It’s PHP and Open Source (GPL), good for me to hack on if needed.
RCW also uses a similar model to my e-mail usage, replacing the message list with a full screen display of a message when reading and composing. Converting this to a tabbed interface might be pretty simple. Maybe add a little tagging goodness (IMAP labels please) and I might switch away from a desktop e-mail client!
I’ve created some mock-ups of what this could look like and stuck them up on Flickr. What do you guys think?
UPDATE: I’ve added this to their feature request list.
- Perhaps due to using Eudora for so many years in the 90’s. [back]