On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 04:24:06PM -0700, Arne Berglund wrote:
On 2013-10-24 16:13, Kelsey Cummings wrote: Really? We have almost 2500 users who are - frankly - very non-technical and eager to complain about technology changes. We moved from the ugly rodent to RC several years ago and never heard a peep about the lack of checkboxes. We did do a couple of internal 60 sec. videos to show the differences, but that was it.
Yes, it was terrible, a relatively large group of users went full Godwin's law on me over it!
We have about 100k users and if anything, we probably lean to the more competent given our market position. The point is that it isn't commercially viable to teach a user using our webmail how to select multiple messages, or that the easiest way to move a message is to drag it to a folder, or that if they right click they get this cool menu. There is also accessibility issues and the increased coordination required - some people, even after being taught, struggle to select multiple messages.
The second biggest problem was support for mobile and tablet users. No
...
We did consider this for a while. But as dedicated apps for mobile mail connection have matured, we no longer feel any pressure to offer a mobile version of webmail. Users just set up IMAP connections directly on their phones and tablets. Now we don't worry about maintaining a special skin just for mobile use.
We certainly agree with that in principal and have tried to make sure our users know that using IMAP from their phone and desktops in combination with webmail is what they really want. However, there are valid usage cases for not using the device's native app. The best example being a shared tablet in a family setting or needing to check your mail from a friend's device.