I don’t have a dog for the same reason it’s hard for me to get excited about email apps: the short, sweet lifespans make you love them so intensely and miss them forever when they’re gone. You’re never sure whether you’ll spend several years with a favorite pup or mail client, or get lucky and have 15 or more. Eventually, in my experience with dogs and email clients, they grow old, fade, and are no more. This is the cycle of life and the software business cycle for many apps.1
While I love dogs and seek permission to pet from the owner of nearly every dog I encounter, I have gone cold on new email apps after decades of losing my greatest loves.
I can’t remember which horrible mainframe program I used first, in the 1980s, but pine—developed at nearby University of Washington—was a standby in my early Unix-plus-Internet days. I adopted Eudora as soon as I found it and used it for many, many years because it only offered text-based email—no HTML! When it petered out around 2002, Mailsmith arose from Bare Bones, with the same text-only front end. Despite friend Rich Siegel and other developers keeping it alive long after its commercial utility had ended, I eventually shifted to Postbox in 2019. Guess what happened in 2024.2
