His mention of the difficulty of getting users to trust AI agents is dead right. All the supposedly wonderful Bayes-based filtering today STILL sometimes crashes and burns, to the point where Thunderbird often thinks that fairly important work emails are junk. I would be hesitant to install any other agents unless they performed extremely trivial tasks.
However...
RE: Number 3
Search is nowhere near good enough right now for most desktop clients. Outlook and Thunderbird alike are both terrible at intelligent searches. Only Gmail has a nice search function, which is why I continue to use it over most desktop clients. If he can make a cross-platform plugin that vastly improves searches without turning my client into a grinding mass of gears (hello Xobni!), he will have a red-hot product.
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RE Number 4:
His mention of the difficulty of getting users to trust AI agents is dead right. All the supposedly wonderful Bayes-based filtering today STILL sometimes crashes and burns, to the point where Thunderbird often thinks that fairly important work emails are junk. I would be hesitant to install any other agents unless they performed extremely trivial tasks.
However...
RE: Number 3
Search is nowhere near good enough right now for most desktop clients. Outlook and Thunderbird alike are both terrible at intelligent searches. Only Gmail has a nice search function, which is why I continue to use it over most desktop clients. If he can make a cross-platform plugin that vastly improves searches without turning my client into a grinding mass of gears (hello Xobni!), he will have a red-hot product.