Slashdot Mirror
Remail: IBM is Reinventing Email
mrbarkeeper writes "IBM Research has thought about email and came up with a prototype of a better mail client.
From their website: 'The Collaborative User Experience (CUE) team in IBM Research has spent nearly a decade studying email. Not only has email become one of the most pervasive and successful collaborative tools available, it has also become a key component of IBM's Lotus Software offerings. In many ways, email can be seen as a victim of its own success - users increasingly suffer from overload and interruptions as well as use email in a manner for which it was not intended.' Several ideas worth discussing, some good, some irrelevant. But still worth a gander for anyone who spends most of their day in their inbox.
Who is John Galt?
Oh no you don't -- cc:Mail, its evil older brother is way worse.
But I R'd TFA and this client looks pretty cool in some respects. Sounds simple, but the list seperators seem quite cool to me (and obvious in hindsight).
The visualizations seem useful and new as well.
I'd try it out. When is a client including these features going to be released?
everything in moderation
I've got to second AC here.
I have to use notes at work and it is the worst mail client I have ever used, by a comfortable margin.
Parts of the interface dissapear when the window is inactive. It can't remember that I want to start up in mail. It can't remember that I want a preview pane. Occasionally the preview pane gets confused and displays the body of a message adjacent to the message header that is selected. The buttons are non-standard. The UI medaphor is glaringly inconstant.
Oh, and it gives me a new mail message, but the new mail isn't listed until I manually refresh half the time.
This is with 5.0.8. Maybe some of these bugs are fixed in newer versions.
Anyway, I am skeptical about anything mail related (or UI related for that matter) that comes from the vendor of such a piece of poop.
-Peter
I've never seen that, and I've been developing with Notes since '99.
It can't remember that I want to start up in mail. It can't remember that I want a preview pane.
File>>Preferences>>User Preferences
I pulled a jack move to cop this sig
>as in the worst email client ever
"Score:2, Funny"? For shame, moderators -- that was "+5 Informative", if I've ever seen it.
So how bad is Lotus Notes, you ask? So bad that The User Interface Hall Of Shame dedicated an ENTIRE PAGE to detailing LN's faults. "This single application could have formed the basis for the entire site."
Yes, it's that bad.
You've never used a mail client that supports threading?!
The main thing that I bemoan having been effectively forced to switch to Outbreak at work is the lack of support for email threading. Previously, *every* client I have *ever* used for any amount of time has supported it, in the 9 or so years that I've had a mail account.
To my mind, not supporting threading simply disqualifies a program from being a serious mail client, no matter what other features it may support. (There are others, too, such as support for multiple accounts, and some sort of filtering mechanism)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
on the security front Notes is the oldest and most widely implemented public key infrastructure. Public keys are held in the name and address book, private keys in the ID file. The security infrastructure is pretty sound and is available to all applications to use. As for bloat and email, exchange and others started life as email servers and grew and evolved extra bells and whistles. Notes started out (that is Plato Notes in the 70's) as a general purpose system for shuffling documents about between databases. Give every user a database and shuffle documents that look like memos between them and you have built an email system. Email is a trivial application of what Notes really is. Alan.
Wow, do you think we could implement this with headers called Message-ID and In-Reply-To? And allow users to implement filters on the In-Reply-To or References headers?
Perhaps we could even create an RFC and give it the number 2822.
And if someone would only write a document describing how to correctly implement these headers in MUAs, we'd really be in business.
</sarcasm>
Really, it's a wonder that most mail clients make all of this so hard. Even Mozilla gets threading wrong, by refusing to allow them to be sorted by anything but Sent date, and always sorting them in your message list by the date of the *oldest* message in the thread, rather than the newest. It makes threads practically useless.
Despite my caustic comments above, it doesn't help that many popular client (like those by MS) don't properly implement In-Reply-To or References. As a result, most clients simply guess at threads by looking at Subjects.
OK, here's some free tech support for you:
Yup, it forgets that you want to keep the preview pane up. The only solution I found to this on the web was to put some script [SNIP}
There's a VERY easy solution--Go to file>>database>>Properties. Then go to the "rocket ship" tab (sorry, but most people who have these troubles need pictures). Then choose "Restore as last viewed by user" under the "When opened in Notes client" option.
See, very simple. Should that have been automatically set? Perhaps.
some obscure scripting language.
Ahem. Lotusscript is EXACTLY the same syntactically as Visual Basic (prior to .Net). While it may not be favored here on slashdot, its not exactly obscure, unless you're not a programmer, but then every language would be obscure to you.
System reports that I have new mail, but selecting "open mail" doesn't reveal any messages
1. Make sure you're checking all your folders. One flaw is that Notes doesn't have an unread count next to the folder, prior to R6. 2. Make sure you're at least past 5.0.5, b/c this issue hasn't shown up for me since then.
The concept of a trash folder is missing;
Well, that's a personal aesthetics, issue, as well, if you have a programmer/developer worth his/her salt, its a very EASY scripting fix.
It sounds to me like your frustration stems from some misinformation, and a lack of a Notes Developer. The Notes mail template is very easily customized, so quite a few options seem to have been left in a manner you don't care for, but with customization could be fixed.
As for your looking forward to Exchange, well good luck to you, and hope it stays up for more than 24 hours. To borrow the bashing phrase being used all over this thread, I find Outlook to be crap.
I pulled a jack move to cop this sig
The Notes client has its issues, but so does every major program. The usual complaint is that it does not act like all other MS apps. I am surprised Slashdotters worry about that. Remember that Lotus Notes was released before MS released Windows3. It was MSWindows that changed all the key bindings from the standards used by Lotus and Wordstar. The only widespread program that did not use those keybindings was WordPerfect, and everybody required cheatsheets to use that it. MS pulled its usual "let's change everything so we can control it." Now it is considered bad that any software has survived from the pre-Windows era when dinosuars roamed.
I would guess that none of the "Notes sucks" comments come from programmers. I figured a discussion about mail clients would pull more from the techies than the comments from plain users that we are seeing. Lotus Notes mail is a programmer's dream. Every aspect of the application interface is built on open source, meaning you can read it and change it. The only closed source code is the code for the thin client, which handles security and encryption.
Development can be through interface settings and several languages: Formula, Java, JavaScript, and LotusScript. Most of the GUI can be programmed using JavaScript, for those who cannot learn advanced languages like the manager-targeted Formula Language.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.