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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
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.
Who is John Galt?
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
BOSS: Yoy've worked for me for nearly a decade, but All I see is you people reading email ...we study email, been doing it for uhhh.. nearly a decade!
Employee: uuhhhh...
BOSS: what is it we pay you for?
Employes: The Collaborative User Experience
BOSS:What have you found out?
Employee: "email has become one of the most pervasive and successful collaborative tools available"
BOSS: How does that fit in with IBM?
employee: It uses...[looks at mug on desk] Lotus!
BOSS: Keep up the good work!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
>as in the worst email client ever
"Score:2, Funny"? For shame, moderators -- that was "+5 Informative", if I've ever seen it.
So how bad is Lotus Notes, you ask? So bad that The User Interface Hall Of Shame dedicated an ENTIRE PAGE to detailing LN's faults. "This single application could have formed the basis for the entire site."
Yes, it's that bad.
Did you notice?
From the screenshots it appears that they have based this prototype on the Eclipse platform.
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!
on the security front Notes is the oldest and most widely implemented public key infrastructure. Public keys are held in the name and address book, private keys in the ID file. The security infrastructure is pretty sound and is available to all applications to use. As for bloat and email, exchange and others started life as email servers and grew and evolved extra bells and whistles. Notes started out (that is Plato Notes in the 70's) as a general purpose system for shuffling documents about between databases. Give every user a database and shuffle documents that look like memos between them and you have built an email system. Email is a trivial application of what Notes really is. Alan.
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.
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.
The Notes client has its issues, but so does every major program. The usual complaint is that it does not act like all other MS apps. I am surprised Slashdotters worry about that. Remember that Lotus Notes was released before MS released Windows3. It was MSWindows that changed all the key bindings from the standards used by Lotus and Wordstar. The only widespread program that did not use those keybindings was WordPerfect, and everybody required cheatsheets to use that it. MS pulled its usual "let's change everything so we can control it." Now it is considered bad that any software has survived from the pre-Windows era when dinosuars roamed.
I would guess that none of the "Notes sucks" comments come from programmers. I figured a discussion about mail clients would pull more from the techies than the comments from plain users that we are seeing. 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. The only closed source code is the code for the thin client, which handles security and encryption.
Development can be through interface settings and several languages: Formula, Java, JavaScript, and LotusScript. Most of the GUI can be programmed using JavaScript, for those who cannot learn advanced languages like the manager-targeted Formula Language.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.