On Wed, Mar 1, 2006 at 9:48 PM, Ron K. Jeffries wrote:

It came to pass in early 2006
a great silence passed across
Laszlo Mail land.

beta users started drifting away,
marking the beginning of the end.

one report of Laszlo Mail’s spellchecker
eating part of a post went unanswered.

historians will one day figure
out what happened, and why.
Speculation that Oliver Steele
decided Laszlo on C#
or Python on Laszlo, or Laslzo on VBA
was the REAL future.

wild rumors flourished, such as Sarah Allen’s
sabbatical to have a second child, or to
rejoin Adobe nee Macromedia.

On Thu, Mar 2, 2006 at 9:41 AM, Bruce Cummins, Laszlo Mail QA lead, replied:

A great hush fell upon Laszlo land
That the users thought was silence
Not knowing that situation in hand
Was a clinic in software science

Blame the QA! developers cried
We want to show you new features
We need to thoroughly test QA replied
Can’t release with nasty creatures

So the build was deployed in house you see
To be used in real life
And found was a bug or two or three
But nothing that caused real strife

Confidence grew as bugs were slew
Warmth filled the Laszlo heart
Looking to the day when Ron would say
“It’s not spell check but it is a start”

…ok back to work…

I find it remarkable that after over a decade of website design; hundreds of published books and thousands of websites dedicated to the subject, there are those who are still able to eek out a career or attain status by republishing the basic tenets of graphic design.

I was amazed by this in 1995, when it became an honor for a guy named David Segal to bestow a site with a somewhat arbitrary (he liked it and it adhered to some basic design principles) “High Five” award.

I am not disagreeing with this fellow that the sites he has chosen have merit and are neatly crafted, but I do find that the distinction of “current, state-of -the-art graphic design…” unsettling. “Current web style”? How about: “relatively innocuous design that happens to be displayed online.” Each of the sites he has chosen to represent utilizes conventions in color, layout, typography, and hierarchical structure that are the centuries-old foundation of print design.

For proof, take a spread from any contemporary magazine, and compare it to the screen grabs… I would argue that 9 times out of 10, you will find the printed page to be superior in every respect. What I see here is someone patting his colleagues on the back for nearly attaining the same results as print.

Even the information organization, hierarchy, navigation of these sites is only a short stone’s throw from the structure of a newspaper, or any of the tomes in your local library’s reference section.

There is nothing novel, or even particularly interesting in the graphic design of these sites beyond an emulation of print. They are simply inoffensive. Perhaps that is enough to win praise, or a small GIF to place tactfully on the home page.

I see real innovation on the web derived from interaction that could not occur anywhere else. Experiences which are, of course, made more pleasant by decent graphic design, but not beholden to them. Wellvetted.com and other similar sites do a good job of surfacing this innovation. Sure, there are many wonky flash-based things that will not be suitable for your enterprise-widget solution, but there are many ideas there that can be leveraged to take said system beyond the notion of form filing to a more integrated, logical, and useful system.

anyway, that is just one of the reasons I come to Laszlo everyday.

signed,

-jaded, old, designer, who is usually too busy to find a soapbox.

Many thanks to Rick, a laszlomail.com user, who pointed out that our spam filtering was being overly aggressive. Spam filtering isn’t part of the core Laszlo Mail product, but it is essential for any hosted email offering. Last week we hooked it up so that mail that is tagged as ’spam’ will get deposited into your Junk Mail folder automatically. It should weed out undesirable emails, but may occasionally catch notes from your friends and colleagues. Please send us feedback (using the button in the upper-right corner of the app) if it isn’t working well for you.

Well now you can. Once you have had a chance to evaluate Laszlo Mail you can take a look at the different prices available for licensing and support. As a way to get you off to a quick start, Laszlo is also offering a special 30% introductory promotional discount on licenses for Laszlo Mail for Business.

We posted a new build tonight without the “demo” branding — woo hoo! With a reasonable storage allocation and open acknowledgement that this is a heck of a lot more than a demo, we hope a few more of you will start using it on a regular basis. (My apologies to your friends who still have to learn how to spell l-a-s-z-l-o. For the moment, we have registered quite a number of misspellings, so you’ll probably get their email anyhow. Of course, your Hungarian friends will do just fine.)

You may notice that we’ve changed the number of messages displayed next to each folder on the sidebar to the unread count rather than the total number of messages. We made this rather arbitrary decision about a year ago, which was fine for our initial feature set. We have an implementation of message filters (aka “rules”) in the works, and it’s pretty nifty if you can easily see how many message you need to look at in various folders that get filtered messages. I use this feature in Thunderbird all the time. The filter feature is one of the most requested features by all you folks using Laszlo Mail in the wild and by our development team internally, so we’re pretty excited about this. (Even more requested is the ability to import contacts from another program, so you’ll be seeing that even sooner.)

In Windows IE, Laszlo Mail will display inline images. It is a lovely feature when you are interested in the message; however, a lot of messages with inline images are unwanted spam. The sick truth is that these folks can figure out that you are reading the message (and therefore discover that your email address is valid) by including a linked image — if the server gets a hit from you, they know your email address AND can associate your IP address with it. Pretty sneaky, huh?

Well, Laszlo Mail now protects you from these slobs. Before it displays inline images, it will display the images with a placeholder graphic and will offer you the option to “Show Images.” Now you can decide if you are interested in your favorite garden catalog or skip the latest promotion for lower mortgage rates.

This new feature and an assortment of smaller improvements can be seen in the newly updated laszlomail.com