Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Remail: IBM is Reinventing Email

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the well-at-least-adding-some-stuff dept.

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.

4 of 510 comments (clear)

  1. This is promising... by whirred · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Sweet function by Paladin128 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  3. Eclipse by Guillermito · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Did you notice?

    From the screenshots it appears that they have based this prototype on the Eclipse platform.

  4. Outlook 2003 by orangenormal · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.