Humanized email

[chombee]

Just had time to glance at this:

http://humanized.com/reader/

and was really impressed. Unfortunately their software seems to be
closed. I'd love if there was a free software RSS reader that worked
this way, they are all way too complex with their multiple panes and
hierarchical folders. The standard desktop RSS reader interface design
seems to be based on the standard 3-pane desktop email interface design,
which I *hate*. And Google Reader, though convenient, isn't much better.

It strikes me that the humanized reader design could also be applied to
an email program, either web or desktop based: just show me my emails,
subject lines as titles with content inline in the middle of the window,
with the source of each email to the left of the content and the date to
the right, all in a single pane, following exactly the same layout as
the reader does.

I read a lot of lists, so I wouldn't always want all my email to be
displayed in a single stream. But I could just use a filter control at
the top of the window to display only email to a specific account, or
from a specific source, or with a specific custom tag, or unread email,
or any other filter that you'd expect to find in Evolution or
Thunderbird, just like the humanized RSS reader can filter for
individual feeds. And this filtering widget should be keyboard operable
with drop-down completion.

For replying to emails, reply buttons could be placed in the pane at the
bottom of each email, on clicking a text-entry box could slide open
within the pane, pushing the emails below down the screen a bit, type
your email into the box and hit send, the box slides closed as the email
is sent. For composing new messages, the same technique could be used
with a 'Send email' button at the top of the window. The only problem
would be if you wanted to consult an older email that was off-screen
while you were typing an email, that would require the text-entry box to
be pinned to the screen so that it stayed in place while the rest of the
content was scrolled up or down. It could still be done without a damn
ugly pane though.

Oh, and your sent emails could be displayed inline with your received
emails, like Gmail does.

I wish an email program like this would come along.

Also, their Enso product looks pretty great: http://humanized.com/