Apple Mail 4.2 is a product in dyer need of upgrade. Whilst it’s an excellent product with unequaled stability, it has major Usability issues, and it lacks any useful Syncing ability. I am also told that addon’s are unreasonably tricky to develop (whilst I have no first hand experience of this, the dearth of extensions supports this).
Simple things like allowing the preview pane to appear on the right (rather than below) should be standard on a modern email client, yet it falls to 3rd party developers to jury rig extensions that ultimately detract from the stability of the application. Mail’s usability also falls short in other areas which are standard on most other email clients, such as colour coding emails, advanced search and attachment checking (a great Thunderbird feature).
“Places” and “People” are also features that could add value to Mail, tied in of course with the same features from iPhoto.
But the email client isn’t Apple’s only failing, the entire email protocol is in dire need of an overhaul, and it seems that Google’s Wave isn’t going to come to save the day afterall.
Microsoft’s Exchange is currently the defacto standard in office email, yet it’s horribly bloated, requires considerable administration and most importantly is ridiculously overpriced. This presents and opportunity for an open source alternative that offers the best features of Exchange and a task that Apple is ideally suited to.
Needless to say, such a product must be multi-platform. OS X based GUI products for Apple’s Servers would also give their hardware line a great boost. Ultimately though, the platform needs to be a product that can be installed as an addition to any server, rather than an operating system in it’s own right.