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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.
Iraq: war to save the U
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 must disagree with you.
If you want an immediate response, get off your fat ass and come to my office. If you cannot, then pick up the phone and call me.
One of the BIGGEST problems in today's world is this "I MUST HANDLE THIS NOW!" mindeset we find ourselves in.
No, you DO NOT NEED AN IMMEDIATE RESPONSE.
Unless the building is on fire, or somebody is in cardiac arrest, or "they've pushed the big red button", you can damn well wait a few minutes (hours, days even) for a response.
Too damn many people think they are being "productive" because they are on the phone all the time. No, you are not being "productive". You are being busy. There is a big difference.
Forcing people to wait for things makes them assess the value of those things, and culls the wheat from the chaff. BS requests get dropped, important requests get made.
But too many people think they can wait until the last minute, then dump a load of shit onto somebody else and make them jump. They use that as a tool to get what they want - they condition you to jump when they ring the bell, and eventually they can slip past anything they want.
We are turning into a world of three year olds - "I WANNA GLASS OF WATER - NOW!".
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
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.