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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.
Interesting ideas except that the headline should title 'Reinventing EMail CLIENT'.
I was looking for ideas against SPAM and nothing there, just a new way to organize your messages and Inbox folder. Some ideas are really good though, like the threads.
But for me the email as we know it is slowly dying because of SPAM and lack of authentication features.
I am still waiting for a brand new EMail system and I know that's a huge debate. But if we don't do anything we will slowly die under thousand of spam messages... Too bad.
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making email spoof-proof, killing UCE (spam), and eliminating the whole idea of HTML email...
Gee, doesn't seem to me that they thought too hard about email at all.
I must admit that I disagree with the assertion that "Pressure to Respond Quickly" is some sort of negative issue with e-mail; in fact, I'd go so far as to say that with the volume of mail in inboxes today, people are actually not feeling enough pressure to respond quickly. Sure, sometimes we're okay with waiting for a response for a while, but oftentimes nowadays email is used in the role that voicemail used to play, and if one receives a voicemail, one tends to reply directly afterwards. Sometimes, the same attitude needs to be taken in regards to email. Here, I see a much more accurate and responsible use of the priority feature in messages being used, with some type of slider built into the client to rate the priority of a message more efficiently as it is sent...
But still worth a gander for anyone who spends most of their day in their inbox.
Who spends most of their day in the inbox? Seriously though, a decent email client is found in OS X with good junk mail filters and nesting etc... Most times it gets near 98% of the junk email and I have yet to have it reject a valid email.
Also from the article: Pressure to Respond Quickly. People report feeling pressure to be more responsive to their email. Messages arrive continuously throughout the day, contributing to the sense of urgency to respond quickly.
Why reinvent the wheel? If the message is not urgent enough to pick up the phone or in our case, ring someone up on iChatAV, then the paradigm does not need changing.
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I've always liked the way most newsreaders threaded posts - IBM's threaded model is one feature that would definately make me switch over. This is a simple yet overlooked feature that Eudora and Outlook have missed. I haven't played with KMail yet and don't know if it has it. Why hasn't email threading been done up until now? -B
I think you meant most secure email client ever, with workflow built in, and an easily accessible API.
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The screenshots look like Outlook, but with extra windows for the calendar and other things. I suppose this will take up desktop space, but then I've been wondering how I was going to waste all this extra space I now have with a dual head video card...
From the article...
"People are overwhelmed by the volume of new email they receive each day. They report spending increasing amounts of time simply managing their email."
In MY world, I call this SPAM. I didn't need 10 years of research to know it was a BAD thing. Spam, I think, is better stopped at the servers or better yet, by blacklisting the spammers.
Outlook (and other clients) have filters that can direct email into various folders sorted by importance. In this way, the important stuff gets my FIRST attention, while the least important stuff can wait.
However, a lot of this aforementioned filtering capability is ALSO dependent on a person's ability to fully utilize their email client. I know of a number of people in management positions who are FULLY CLUELESS regarding moving files from one directory to another. Setting up a filter WOULD BE totally beyond them. Without even basic computer literacy skills, any new technology that requires interaction with a user interface is bound to stumble. Relying the smarts of the end user is simply not a good business model unless you're dealing with technically-savvy people.
But I'll vent anyhow. My issues with e-mail are generally twofold:
1. People expect email to be a time-sensitive medium when it's really the LEAST time-sensitive medium of all. I've seen people send an email that they EXPECT a response in several minutes. If I have a time critical issue, I don't send e-mails, I start calling people directly. And how many times have you avoided even opening up an e-mail from a certain recipient because you didn't want to have to deal with that person and were afraid that it'd have a return receipt attached to it?
2. For the most part, the problem for me isn't an e-mail client. My problem lies in spending tons of hours trying to create the perfect politically correct response to a completely retarded question from the CEO that isn't going to piss off him, my boss, and the managers of the all of the departments, and everyone else in between.
What you stupid whining fuckers always miss is the simple obvious fact that Notes is *NOT* a mail client. It's a client for an application delivery platform which just happens to offer mail as one of its applications.
Your beef is with the mail application development team inside Lotus, not with the notes client itself.
Christ, it's like saying the Macintosh isn't a good mail client - it's completely fucking irrelevant and only shows off your own stupidity!
what version are you using? versions that are 5 years old are probably 5 years behind the times. Big corporates which use Notes often have a really long upgrade cycle, so if your work email on Notes 4.5 looks a bit dated when compared to your Outlook Express 2003 or whatever then I am not surprised. Try Notes client 6.5 and remember that Notes is more than email just as windows is more than a word processor and Linux is more than just a development environment. Alan.
Perhaps Notes is very secure. Certainly the "confidential" tab is useful as it makes encryption transparent and easy to use (don't give me any of that "GPG/PGP is easy" nonsense) but...
[rant]
I feel strongly negative about Lotus Notes. It almost NEVER works the way I expect and *want* it to.
Trying to actually use Notes is unbelieveably frustrating. From trying to search through old messages (why doesn't searching between two dates work?) to the idiotic way it sorts by subject (it doesn't realise that "subject" and "Re: subject" should sort next to each other.) to the simplest tasks like copy/paste... they couldn't even get copy/paste to work correctly. AARRGGHHH!!!!
And the worst thing is that my company requires me to use the damn thing for my job.
Notes-eesss... we hates it! We hates it forever!
[/rant]
Ok... I'll stop now before I really get worked up.
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Notes might not be the most elegant piece of software in the world, but one thing that astounds me is the insistence of people to just classify it as 'email.'
It's far more than that, and to think it's just an email program is like calling the Vatican a dump because the restroom is nasty. Okay, stupid example.
Anyway, think about it. When a user has Notes installed, it is far more than just email. They instantly have access to a wide range of applications, some of which can be extremely complex. They can participate in complicated workflow applications simply by having the Notes client; they don't even need to access the databases where these applications are written.
Think about some of the brilliant executives out there, and trying to show them how to use some new travel approval database. Then consider that all a good programmer needs to do is send the relevant info to the exec when necessary, and the exec simply clicks Yes, No, whatever and it's done. All from email. I don't know any other email programs that do that out of the box. You'll need about 5 different applications within Microsoft to do that for Outlook.
Anyway, Notes is far more than just email.
You didn't RTFA, did you? I don't think outlook "group by" is the same thing that the article describle, or at least I can't get it to look like what the article images show. I suspect the apple labels are different from this too, but I can't confirm here. I can and did check outlook, it doesn't seem to do these label speratorsm, and even outlook help describes "group views" differently than what I'm thinking of:
A group is a set of items with something in common, such as e-mail messages from the same sender or tasks with the same due date. Group items to see related items together, similar to an outline. For example, group items by priority to separate high-priority items from low-priority items. You can expand or collapse the group headings to display or hide the items they contain.
You can only group items that are in a view based on a table or a timeline view type. When you group items by a field that can contain more than one entry, such as the Categories field, items may appear more than once in the table or timeline. For example, if you group by the field, Categories, and an item has two categories, such as Business and Ideas, the item is listed under both the Business group heading and the Ideas group heading. Though you see the item more than once, it exists as only one item. Any changes you make to one instance of the item are stored with all instances of the item.
The feature in the article shows horizontal dividing lines between sections in list/table views which change as you re-sort. So a view by date would look something like:
Monday 3/4, 2 messages, one unread
message 1
message 2
Tuesday 3/5, 1 message, 0 unread
message 1
etc.
If you click to re-sort by another field, such as date or sender, you get a re-sorted list with new divider labels to break up the list.
Tell me how to do that in Outlook please.
everything in moderation
I use Lotus Notes V5 at work, and Outlook 2002 to connect to my old university mailbox (graduated, but still have a lifetime MS exchange mailbox :-) )
Basically, all the ideas are already properly implemented in Outlook 2003.
Threaded discussions
Search folders
you name it...
Btw Notes is one of the most clunky programs ever. I dont care about an open API just allow me to read my mail properly!
I dont like the way that threads appear to be addressed in this client; nested trees that drop down are intuitive, contextually and chronologically this looks counterintuitive at first glance, with messages in a thread appearing above AND below the root of the thread.
Once again, Mozilla does it better.
They spent ten years studying email; they would have done much better releasing this client and moulding it in line with the feedback that they get from tens of thousands of users. I think this is partly why Mozilla is such a pleasure to use; its built on the experience of many people folded into the development cycle over lots of iterations. When you have an insular group looking at a problem from only their own viewpoint, you get suboptimal results, and you end up with cumbersome features like the thread handling in this preview.
Ideally, they should be building this out of Mozilla in any case, for all the advantages this will bring to IBM and everyone everywhere.
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Pick up Al Franken's book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right Where you will find well-researched (@Harvard) arguments that the whole phenomenon of people thinking Al Gore was an idiot was a creation of right-wing sensationalist (aka mainstream) media. Don't buy into it again in '04
Sorry, you've been infected with the Lotus Notes Virus. It infects humans who then lose their power to reason about anything related to Notes, and feel obligated to suggest Notes as a solution for EVERY problem, whether it fits or not.
"We can script that! It will be great!"
"Oh, that's built in! It will only take a little scripting!"
Pointing out that URLs with an 80-char hash in them are practically unusable gets a stony glare, and an equally stony silence. One Notes-infected manager told me once that you can create aliases for the way-too-long URLs that you use a lot... No, sorry, the ADMIN can create those aliases.
Notes has some value in some situations. It is NOT God's Swiss army knife.
And I don't think this thread is relevant to the interesting research results presented in the linked article.
All this so we could have webmail.
I heartily agree. My favorite saying has become "A crisis on your part is not necessarily a crisis on my part". I think that the easier it is to access someone there are people who will immediately contact them for an answer instead of taking a few minutes to figure it out themselves. Usually they have figured it out by the time you reply. Wait a bit before sending out an email/page/etc, this is an especially good idea if you are upset. ;)
This is not to say it is ok to ignore one's email. A check once or twice a day, at least, is expected and if you can't work on it soon a quick reply saying so is courteous.
If you are the paranoid type and your group uses Outlook (not sure if all email systems support this) turn on receipts so you know they read it.
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Most of the "non-standard" features in Notes are a direct result of two factors; Notes was created prior to a market-dominating windowing interface and needed it's own paradigm and it was and is multi-platform (although the Mac client is the only non-Windoze one left these days, it previously had OS/2, AIX, and Solaris clients). I'm amazed at how the normally anti-MS /. crowd so happily wishes everything to conform to Microsoft's interface views which aren't even completely consistent across all the Office suite products.