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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.
Although Lotus Notes has a UI that most users don't like, it runs circles around the alternative mail platforms in terms of workflow and customization. If they can somehow coordinate their efforts here with what they already have in Lotus, maybe we'll be saved from an Outlook work yet.
The BBC has an interesting article about the overflow created by e-mail. Where 31 billion e-mails are sent every day, you think that systems might need to be updated to handle such volume (and help cut some unessary volume out)
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
A better email client is a good thing, whether being pushed by small developers with a few unique ideas, or by a group as large as IBM with decades of research behind them. However, apart from the occasional efforts from businesses like Yahoo, the whole email distribution path doesn't seem to be getting as much attention as it could.
Even if it's just theory, research and study, are there publicly accessible projects by larger groups (such as IBM) looking at how to completely overhaul email transmission, especially for the elimination of spam and the ability to drag an address with you that's not dependant (for most people) on an ISP? I'd be all for a completely new system running side by side with conventional SMTP type email for several years, even.
I was ready to be a critic of this before I RTFA--after all we're talking IBM and Lotus Notes, the worst email client ever--but they really have thought about how integrating this information would make it easier to organize and communicate.
One problem I see is that most email information is very hard to parse reliably if it's just free-format text. Sure you can tell people to send out formal meeting invitations but not all clients support that. It would be great if you received a message that said "how about a meeting next Monday at 1pm my time" and the software would pop up your schedule for next Monday at 4pm because you're eastern time and he's pacific.
The client should follow my trend of sorting emails for a couple of months and then gain enough intelligence to do it own its own.
First sorting SPAM v/s useful email :- I guess this is alsways being worked on, thunderbird does it. But its not adaptive enough.
Second Sorting based on emails that I ignore though they are not spams, like periodic reminders , baby shower notices (really do i need to care ?), emails about personal events in lives of my fellow employes (marriage, death) etc . about which I don't care., Ack. receipts etc.
A lot of time my inbox is filled with mail which is originating from my company but in a sense is junk to me. It is too cumbersome to come with filters for a lot of them. We need some AI in the email client.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Security, schmecurity.
Notes is painful to use. Why develop a secure client if none of your users is going to want to use it?
Ich werde nie wieder denken
Yeah... they're mapping and graphing is a beautiful use of modern information visualization techniques. Honestly, after spending 10 minutes with her, I could see my mom using this kind of thing in a way that previous mail clients stumped her. Maybe I can hack an XUL plugin for Thunderbird that will do this...
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Basically, they're doing what all good HCI (Human-Computer Interface) teams do. They're grabbing all the good stuff and throwing away all the not-as-good stuff. There's nothing particularily new here, except for the addition of certain visualizations. Most of these ideas are already implemented in M2 (Opera's email client) or in Mail.app (OS X's default mail client) or in various other Unix mail clients.
M2 is basically one big folder, and all the other folders you define are filters on the main folder. They also have a quick reply pane at the bottom of the message so you can fire off a reply that doesn't require very much input.
OS X's Mail.app has the little green dot beside a sender's name when they're online and available for chat. It threads things (like any good email client. Strangely, MOST Windows clients don't. Hmm.) can colour code things and has a pretty reasonable filtering facility (though nothing as on-the-fly as what IBM proposes.)
The thing I hate most about working under Windows is the lack of a really solid email client. Opera's M2 is the best I've found so far, and I hear Outlook 2003 FINALLY allows you to respond to emails properly, instead of the fscked up way that Microsoft has always demanded. (Yes, you can embed your replies, but it's never been quite right. Outlook strongly encourages top-posting.)
Oh, and Mozilla's was good, but I find the browser far inferior to Opera, so I gave up on it. Maybe when the forked email client is finally stable, I'll give it a try again.
taco Taco Taco... IBM is Reinventing Email does this mean I can send my thoughts to IBM and let them compose my emails? Does this mean they're unleashing a new protocol?
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. Sometimes I wonder where they hold these studies, and I always wonder why they don't post metadata stats on this... (Age, Profession, Sex, etc) I'd like to see who feels pressured into responding to email. Me for one inbox +300 per day mailing lists, friends, fam, work... Pressure = 0 When I get to it, I get to it. I'm human not a machine and if someone would ever attempt to pressure me I would not deal with them anymore. My sanity, and health are more important than email. If it was that important, s'what phones are for.
Losing Track of Email and the increasing fear of doing so. High volumes of email cause important items to quickly move out of view. Users must hunt down their mail, often having to scroll to other parts of their mailbox. This problem is exacerbated as email arrives in a single, undifferentiated stream. The mailbox becomes an assortment of items requiring action, informational items, and items with no value to the user at all (e.g., spam). I disagree with this. Having worked in numerous sorts of tech industry, I take stupidity to be the number one cause. Porly trained individuals who don't have enough in them to learn something new. EG I used to work on a help desk in the 90's, and remember vividly how etards would call because they didn't know where they saved something.
The headline is misguiding. I took it to be a new protocol coming out, should be changed to IBM's new email client nothing more
MoFscker
The point, I think, is that people feel they need to stop what there doing, and reply to email.
Giving it the same 'respect' as someone walking up to there cube, or using the phone. Unfortunatly, people will send you that 'quick email' about nothing. or CC people on a thread that that don't need to be on. But if they are going to talk to you, then they are far more lily to keep it on a work subject.
I think it was phones4all, or some some such company, that recently mandated that no email is to be used interoffice communication, only the phone or face to face. The owner founf that 3 hours a day was wasted do to email.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I agree. Notes did have too much of a database feel to it with replication being way too big of a deal. But I actually think Notes helped shape this article. I often created those exact same groupings as they have displayed. Notes is the ONLY email I've ever been able to program to make more useful as in groupings and sorting a folder by views (IANAP).
If it is IBM then it must terrible, right? (did you forget they SUPPORT linux now)
Oh, and I do still use pine (it feels like it is quicker and more productive.. but that is probably because I am not click-and-drueling)
Apple's default and free email client, Mail.app, will be gaining some of these advances in version two.
A quick runthrough of some of the major new features also covered in the IBM article:
* 'Collections' - Called 'Smart Mailboxes', these work almost identically to iTunes' smart playlists. Set up mailboxes which are dynamically generated from all your accounts, customised by a set of rules. Very, very useful.
* Message marking - label your emails. How often do you not want to move your emails to another mailbox, but still want to flag them for later attention? Say hello to mail labels - combined with smart mailboxes, your workflow is smooooth.
* iCal integration - not finalized yet, but look for more integration here.
They're still looking at message collapsing (by week or by day), but this may all just go into iCal integration. Some test builds allow you to just select days, weeks, or months and see the emails for those days. It's a remarkably simple but remarkably useful extension of the smart mailboxes function.
iChat integration is a little frowned on at the moment. We'll see.
I am in complete agreement. I too am forced to use LN (5.0.10) at work, and the UI is absolutely awful. Simple things like Cut and Paste don't even work intuitively.
For that matter, every IBM UI I have to work with is terrible (DB2 Client, WSAD). I often wonder if IBM even does usability testing with its client software.
As far as ReMail goes, it looks like much of its 'new' functionality exists in current email clients (List Seperators, Annotations -Outlook '03; Threads - LN 5+, though implemented poorly). Some of the visualization stuff looks 'neat' but I am not sure if it would ultimately be very usefull.
What I find myself wishing for the most, is when someone sends me a mail on a new subject (a selectable option on their part) a new and totally unique message-id could be generated and included in the header. This would persist for any replies, forwards, etc from either myself of anyone else on the CC list. My mail client would then allow me to do two things: 1) to thread on this ID, even if the text of the subject changed, and 2) if I no longer wanted to take part in the discussion, to send a special message to the other mail addresses in the discussion, instructing their mail clients to remove me from any more CC's on that ID. Enabling me, if I chose, to opt out of any further discussion on that subject.
I'd find this very powerful, and very useful. And I'm sure other people would come up with new and interesting ways to make this even more functional.
Macka
Did you notice?
From the screenshots it appears that they have based this prototype on the Eclipse platform.
Finally, let me echo any sentiments about how crap Notes is. I'm now actually looking forward to having us move to Outlook and Exchange. Among the other bits of weirdness/annoyences:
Who spends most of their day in the inbox?
PHB's at large corporations, at least that's my experience.
I had a large corporate client where I personally knew 5+ managers who basically spent all day receiving and sending e-mail every second they weren't in meetings.
There was definitely an element of CYA involved. After all, they wouldn't want to lose their six-figure incomes by not chiming in on the latest-invented-crisis now would they?
Needless to say, if you had to do anything with the e-mail settings on their laptops or help transfer their mail to a new machine - they would hover around you the whole time with a look of quiet terror in their eyes.
Sadly, one of the things which the time management experts apparently haven't addressed is how to deal with the twit who mails you, then calls / drops by two minutes later to see if you received it, and why you haven't answered.....
DDB (who thought he had a solution, until he discovered his employer frowns on TEC9s in the office)
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
They may call it "collaborative", but email has become a major push technology. In fact, the more you "collaborate", the more the system ends up pushing to everyone involved. This is why we have trouble managing this incoming stream of mail ... because it is a stream.
In a more meta sense, email can run you over since they are many and you are just one. Now, you'd think that would mean smart programming to manage the mess, but in practice that hasn't been so. All that email clients seem to let you do is split the stream into smaller ones, which you must still and laboriously examine. Rule systems are still pathetic for managing this for you. But could lay some of this sentiment upon Internet search engines. There's always crucial few features that are absent (to sum up, I need a "do what I meant" button) that make the result a slog though link after link, like with email.
I spent a little time examining IBM's offering, and I can say from that limited exposure that they are only applying a few more piddling features that still don't address the major problem: You (not the program) are being forced to drink from a firehose.
To avoid this, the app must do more work, and it must perform that work on its own. It must watch how you work with an incoming stream of email; and with minimal prompts from you, start handling them in accordance to those guidelines.* It must constantly analyze, learn to form new rules and to adjust current ones, and be prepared to axe entire rulesets upon your demand.
That would be some hellacious programming to attain, but given the pay of the allegedly more skilled programmers around, they'll certainly earn it for this one.
*
HAL: Dave, I've noticed that you're pulling my memory and personality boards. Shall I eject the rest for you?
Dave: Yes, HAL, please pull the remaining boards while I catch up on my $%($^* email.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
A lot of these features are already in Outlook 2003, albeit under different names. The coloured annotations, collection folders, and headers described in the article have all recently made an appearance in Outlook 2003.
At the risk of being modded down, I quite like these features and thus... *gulps* also like... the new Outlook.
Keep in mind that notes was not originally IBM's creation. IBM owns it since buying Lotus. All Lotus products had "non-standard" UI features, that is from the dominant standard POV.
--AP
I agreee about the mail client. SMTP has yet to be fully taken advantage with its design. SMTP has only been used to pass around mail that is usually read by the users without header verification. Unix has features usually installed to filter mail, but with a little setup. Most spam can be filtered by the data in the mail headers, yet most mail clients do not verify the headers. I wrote a utility to verify headers and it caught anywhere from 70% to 100% of the spam. The other 30% of spam had legit mail headers; hence, they are easily trackable to the real sender. I already have new projects to setup alternate mail transfer channels. That is set to be done after I redesign some other internals in my project. I look forward to see concepts of newer mail clients, so I can make appropriate enhancements.
the UI has changed significantly in 6.0.* and 6.5 6.5 is really sweet with instant messaging integration built in to the mail client and all custom applications. If I open a mail my buddy list grows a to: and cc: group with all the recipients and all my databases which have a name anywhere grow little green icons if the user is online. This is a bit hard to explain without seeing it in action, here is a link to a webcast that may be of interest. (the webcast probably needs windows, but then so does Notes. I want a Linux version of the Notes client.)
Threads ("Conversation view"), collections ("search folders"), chat, calendar... sounds like Outlook to me.
The main feature I don't think Exchange does is RSS, but the IBM team's implementation is silly. In their opening paragraph they say "This problem is exacerbated as email arrives in a single, undifferentiated stream. The mailbox becomes an assortment of items requiring action, informational items, and items with no value to the user at all" yet they also tout the ability to include RSS streams appearing in your inbox just like email!
The correspondants feature looks nifty, but it looks like the kind of thing that would instantly become useless once you join a few mailing lists or other distribution groups.
For Outlook users, the best current add-on IMHO is Nelson Email Organizer.
It treats the Outlook PST file as a database and all your email is lumped into
one box. After that, it allows you to set folders and other filter
criteria based to sort your mail. The same email message can appear in multiple
places based on filter criteria. But only one copy of the message is
actually saved. You can filter based on attachment type, or relative dates
(last week, last Monday) etc.
I have no association with NEO, just a happy user.
that does not happen now, you see new mail straight away. The refresh arrow is there largely due to historical reasons. Rebuilding a view index is a costly operation, on a large database if a lot of documents had been updated it could take several minutes to update the index (on a 386 running OS/2) The blue arrow indicates that there are documents that need to be inserted into the index and gives you the option of not doing it every time a document is updated. Remember that fundamentally notes is a collaborative application, it is just the mail file that usually has a single user, so this was to allow applications to scale on the hardware of the time.
That said, they could have changed this behaviour a little sooner than they did.
It *was* in my mail client yesterday...in Outlook 2003. I haven't been much impressed with MS-Outlook until this version. It has a lot of cool stuff in it (most of which IBM is mentioning as features in the article above). Conversation view (makes e-mail into a newsgroup-style threaded view) has been one of my favorites. I'm still dicking around with it to see what it can do, and I've found a lot of pleasant surprises over the past 3 weeks.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
I'll take that bet if I can choose the company. I'm at a Fortune 500 company now that uses Notes, and uses it extensively. Everything from low-level scheduling apps to factory/plant operations to VP-level strategic management and portfolio planning.
Everything is done through Notes...the annual employee's evaluation process, education scheduling, travel planning, you name it.
And we use it for Internet, Intranet, synching with SQL and Oracle...Business Objects, the list goes on.
I do agree that some companies only use it for email; and that's just plain stupid. In fact, the last company I was at decided to suspend all applications via Notes for cost reduction measures. Dumb.
The company I'm at has hundreds if not thousands of global apps on Notes. I can't imagine what they would do without it at this point...
some valid points some invalid points, and a complete lack of an appreciation that Notes is not just an email system. Developers and users of custom applications love it. People who used 4.6 for just email were less enthusiastic. Moving back into this century Developers still love it and the UI has moved on a bit. Can people please critisise the current versions? this is like flaming Linux 2.0 for inadequate SMP support.
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.
We're forced into using Notes at my job too (a small software team, none of us have ever used it before). I can't say I like it very much, but I have heard about how Lotus Notes is supposed to be infinitely customizeable. I have yet to find a book or something that explains how to approach programming on Notes. Or any documentation, for that matter, that goes beyond simple user-level configuration. Can you point me toward some kind of intro to Notes programming?
"First you gotta do the truffle shuffle."
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.
Oh, yeah, that's a REALLY easy solution. Let's talk about the reasons that it's not. 1) It violates the UI standards. Options like this should be in Tools -> Options, just like every other program. At a bare minimum, perhaps File -> Preferences. Digging down into "database" properties doesn't spring immediately to the normal mind when attempting to save user settings. 2) Yes, it should be set by default. When a user first uses a piece of software, they get it setup how they want and want to forget about it. I shouldn't have to tell the software to save my fucking settings, they should be saved by default! This is a prime example of Lotus throwing shit all over the damn app at random.
programmer, but then every language would be obscure to you.
Which would classify pretty much every user who's forced to use this piece of shit. Your solution below to LN's inability to comprehend a trash folder is to script it. You say here that you need to be a programmer to do that, therefore, the solution does not exist for the users.
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.
Ahh, the "that was fixed in the latest version" cop-out that is so often blasted by /.ers...unless it bolsters their own arguments. As for the problem at hand, since Notes' rules don't seem to work (at least here, I'm sure they must for someone), my inbox is the only place I receive mail. I've seen the same problem, and we're on 5.06a. The stupid piece of shit will tell me I have mail, I hit "Open Mail" and there isn't any. Then, I hit refresh, because, god forbid, Notes has to be told I want to look at new stuff, rather than just assuming I do, and there's STILL nothing there. That's ok, though, I'll take your word on the "fix" 'cause our Notes admins give us the same "That's just Notes" excuse, too. In other words, they know it's a piece of shit, too.
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.
No, it's not. Having deleted items sit in my inbox until I permanently purge them from the system is stupid, stupid, stupid, no matter what your argument. I hit delete, that means I don't want to see them anymore, it does not mean I want them to cease to exist. As for the scripting fix, see above.
As for your looking forward to Exchange, well good luck to you, and hope it stays up for more than 24 hours.
Prior to this job, I administered Exchange servers for over 6 years, and never once had a problem keeping them up for more than 24 hours. In fact, a year was the typical uptime. Barring power outages, you setup Exchange and forget about it.
To borrow the bashing phrase being used all over this thread, I find Outlook to be crap.
Because you're obviously a Notes Developer/Admin. As I said, I've adminned Exchange servers for years, and it never failed once that when I had a user come in from a Notes environment, they'd say the same thing, "We used to use Notes at my last job, my god, I can't believe how hard I used to have to work just to check my e-mail!" Outlook is designed for users, but it's also is well-designed (in terms of interface, at least). The only people who like Notes are Notes zealots.
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