Letters (email app) update

Letters (or Letters.app, for the suffixophiliacs in the audience) is the name of the email client that was kicked off in my Email init post.

That was Saturday. I’m writing this Monday night, many hundreds of emails later. It turns out that lots of people are not only interested in a new email client, they’re willing to work on it. Way more than I expected or even hoped for.

Though I’m usually not a fan of bringing voting anywhere near software, there are exceptions — and voting on a leader for an open source project is one of them, at least in this case. We start voting Tuesday at noon Pacific, and voting ends 24 hours later. Then we’ll have a leader, and this thing will be off-and-running.

I’ve been using the title President rather than leader, to emphasize the election thing and also imply a term limitation. The president’s job is to ship the next major release. The first president will ship 1.0. This keeps the job product-focused rather than time-focused.

The name Letters is courtesy Caio Chassot — @kch on Twitter. Great name, I think. It was adopted quickly and without disagreement.

There is an @lettersapp Twitter account you can follow. We registered lettersapp.com as well, but nothing is set up there yet.

Once we have a president, I’ll announce it on the mailing list and on this weblog, then turn over the Twitter account and lettersapp.com to that person.

And then you can expect to hear more from him or her as work continues.