Over at NJN Stephan has been discussing some of the features of the soon to be available Windows 8. I am looking forward to having a chance to deploy the public beta in a dual boot environment and confess I am confused about one of the features that will be part of the mail suite. An exempt from the full article:
Windows Live as a Microsoft brand will disappear when Windows 8 ships. Windows 8 Mail is a better product that integrates more smoothly with the operating system. Windows 8 will bring many new features for users that make it an upgrade to own.
Gmail can’t combine multiple mail accounts into one client. Apple can’t do it either.
I was speaking to an industry pundit last month and he said Google’s architecture is based around the Gmail account and they would have to change their system at its roots. That made sense: Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Adsense, YouTube – each Google product is based on your account.
Google’s recent changes to combine all services under one agreement by account does nothing to streamline the user experience. Most people have several Gmail accounts, perhaps one for work, another for a small business or hobby and then a personal Gmail account.
It is entirely possible that I do not understand an integrated mail box, but my understanding would be the ability to extract mail from multiple mail servers and present it in one unified format – I.E. inbox – or give the reader the ability to read mail from one particular source if they so wished. If my understanding is even close to correct I have been doing that for years with GMail.
I believe it was Peter Rukavina who steered me in this direction years ago – using the effective spam filtering of GMail for my other accounts and then retrieving my mail using the mail client of my choice.
From the readers perspective mail is presented in a unified Inbox and the reader has the choice of reading individual accounts. In this case the individual accounts are set up in the client.
My iPad, Mac, Playbook and Blackberry are similar.
I am trying to figure out if the Windows 8 approach is really anything new or if the ‘softies’ have again copied others who had a better way. Time will tell.