One of the three main features of the .Mail app:
Imagine finding every attachment someone sent you, sorted by date or name directly in your email client? It’s similar to the “All your files” functionality in your OSX Finder.
It seems like such a great idea! So many times have I felt utterly lost in my emails, searching for a particular attachment from someone.
But then it struck me. I seriously dislike attachment files. In addition to being next to impossible to find, they bloat my mailbox because I cannot delete them without also deleting the email. And as anyone with moderate to large sized mailbox knows, a bloated mailbox is a sluggish mailbox.
Also think about the wasted bandwidth in delivering those files! It’s not rare to see an email with a nice 10-meg Powerpoint file being delivered to 10-20 people, most of them quite liberally CC’d, “just FYI”. So what’s the solution?
I dunno. Sparrow had a great idea of automatically uploading attachments to Dropbox and pasting a link to the file in the email. Still one might argue that since the files are not delivered as part of the email, they might not be accessible if they are needed later on (the sender might have deleted the file from his/her Dropbox). But that’s clearly an edge case that I’d be very much OK with.
(by the way, did you notice the clever pun with the name of the .Mail app?)