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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".
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.
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:
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
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.
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
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.