Claris Emailer

» see claris.com/products/emailer as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Claris Emailer was originally a Fog City Software product from 1995 that Apple's Claris subsidiary acquired and rebranded. Its differentiating feature in the mid-90s was multi-protocol fan-in: a single inbox that handled internet POP, AppleLink, CompuServe and, uniquely, AOL email. It was the only third-party email client AOL ever licensed to access AOL inboxes directly, which gave it a real audience among Mac users who lived part-time in both internet and AOL worlds.

Version 1.0 shipped 1995, version 2.0 in 1997 with proper AppleScript integration, address autocompletion, multiple signatures, a scriptable filter system, and the ability to schedule mail runs. The last release, 2.0v3, came out 22 January 1998 and was mostly a Y2K patch. It was a competent client in the same conceptual generation as Eudora and the early Outlook Express, with the AOL connection as its trump card.

Apple's January 1998 restructuring of Claris into FileMaker Inc. killed development. Emailer was not on the list of products the new FileMaker company wanted to keep. The 22 January 1998 release was the last one, the team dispersed, and within a year Outlook Express and a young Eudora Pro had taken the Mac email client share. AOL revoked the third-party access protocol Emailer relied on, so the AOL feature stopped working before the client itself was obsolete.

claris emailer never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was a mac-only product in a country where macs were ad agencies and graphic-design studios, not households or student desks. the mail client i used in 1998 was the integrated client in netscape communicator, then a brief and disappointing visit to outlook express, then eudora light when a friend mentioned it on irc.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed on macs ~

The reason Emailer mattered to its users was the multi-account inbox. In 1996 a Mac household with both AOL and an ISP account had to launch two separate apps to read its mail. Emailer pulled everything into one window with a unified search and an automatic filter rules engine. The AppleScript hooks meant power users could automate triage in a way that Eudora and the bundled Netscape client could not match.

The product had a small but devoted user base, the kind of community that still ran Emailer 2.0v3 under Mac OS X's Classic Environment well into the early 2000s because no replacement did the AOL trick. A volunteer mailing list called Emailer-Talk kept patches and scripts circulating for years after the company stopped existing.

~ the long tail ~

The codebase died with Claris. AOL closed the third-party API that gave Emailer its competitive moat. The Apple-native replacement, Mail.app, did not ship until Mac OS X 10.0 in March 2001, and even then it only spoke standard POP and IMAP. The multi-protocol inbox idea Emailer had popularized for Mac users took another decade to come back as the universal model on phones, where Gmail and Outlook eventually fanned together IMAP and Exchange and webmail into a single feed.

Sam Schillace and the Claris HomePage team got remembered because Schillace went to Google Docs. The Emailer team mostly did not get remembered, which feels backwards given that the AOL trick was the more impressive piece of engineering.

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