Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Looks At Integrating Forums and E-mail
prostoalex writes "Scott Hanselman shares a document from Microsoft Research internal Web site on Gina Venolia's latest research in user interface design. Since half of the e-mail conversations require reply and then further replies, the model is not too different from current Web forums. Future Outlook versions might integrate the nested interface for e-mail conversations." Gotta say, that'd be pretty nice to have.
/. ran a story about this very thing from IBM's R&D who also came to the same conclusion.
;-)
Honestly, it's hard to believe that it took PHD "rocket scientists" to come to the conclusion that email is probably better interfaced as a forum. We've all known that for years. It's also hard to understand why there aren't "big name" email clients that already support that kind of interface.
Thinking of Microsoft's offering in this area, it would be nice if they automatically emailed the author of the worm that ravaged your system so you could conduct a forum-interfaced conversation with the person. Kinda like an auto-Friendster between worm-authors and worm-targets.
Great, we're going backwards... this is USENET, isn't it? I love that people first complain that new technology doesn't do what they want, but rejoice when new technology does what the old technology did, just at four times the cost. Really people, can we invent something new for once?
"Life's funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't." --Cat's Cradle
It's all about trusted computing, people.
IAALS.
...Apple Mail has done this since Panther came out. Emails can be viewed as threaded discussions. It's clever, and doesn't just go on subject line, but also pays attention to in-reply-to headers (or whatever it's really called).
Mozilla already has this. You can set your email to threaded view and it looks just like it does when viewing a newsgroup. Newsgroups are really email meets forums. Forums just seem to be gaining more ground today instead of newsgroups.
There is nothing new here. Move along people, nothing to see.
When I saw Hemos making a positive comment about this Microsoft product, I just paused there over my keyboard and in an almost exhuberant voice exclaimed "What? What's this!?" in wonder and awe at this lack of zealotry on this morning.
Hemos, you are my hero. Also, I do agree that it would be a fine thing to have.
Usenet?
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
Just use a Mac. Their email client pretty much does this already.
Isn't this feature already there in Outlook? Threading messages...?
Oh wait, look at that. Apple's Mail.app has threaded email already...
The latest version of MacOS X Mail attempts to do threading to keep back-and-forth discussions together.
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
Apple's Mail already has mail threading.
Mailing lists???
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Here Microsoft goes again repackaging something as innovation.
Now we can spend minutes loading chain emails with 1mb activex controls, and several viruses all at once.
Microsoft: Where will u be able to go today?
Apple: Where will u go while we distract you with random graphics?
Linux: How will u go where you want today?
Evolution seems to support Threaded message view, am I missing something here?
mutt had this for years, right? It is called threaded view or something like that.
And oh please, don't put it in a web page-like interface..
Every mail reader I've used for several years will display messages like that. Admittedly, they've added more dancing clowns, but the view looks the same as in other readers.
Looks to me like they're just fixing stuff that they never got around to implementing in Outlook in the first place. This is one of the reasons that I've always thought Outlook sucked so bad. If they put in thread view, it'll suck a little less bad.
Wow, next thing you know, they'll be inventing the command line!
I mean, just imagine... You could control a computer just by typing in text, almost like language! None of those bizarre manhandling a carpal tunnel creating mouse all day to point at primitive representations on the screen!
Er, oh wait. They are.
Why is it that whenever Microsoft "invents" something that everyone else has had for decades, it's "big news" and "innovation" ?
For most old-school netizens, the newsgroups are the best way to get spammed.
Somebody once used Netscape to forward one of my private mails to a newsgroups.
Since then, this address has become useless : too much spam.
Now, if you want to integrate both systems, mail and news, you'd rather think of a non-obvious way to obfuscate email address.
I also guess it'd be a good idea for Google to just enable anyone to EASILY get some posts mentioning his own coordinates removed.
At least, they could detect email address and encrypt these.
Until then, you won't convince me to use the newsgroups anymore.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Ximian evolution has done this, at least since 1.4.5 and probably earlier. My e-mail has been a lot easier to manage using this format. It must have been real tricky for Microsoft to 'think up' this idea, when an actual product already has it in use. Oh wait, that's what they do... They'll probably patent it now.
>Future Outlook versions might integrate
>the nested interface for e-mail conversations
They should better work on a noob-proof attachment handling and add a dozen of messageboxes when the luser double-clicks the attachment... 'Are really you sure you want to open nudeteens.jpg.exe?'
If they'd at least integrate a virus scanner... they did buy a AV company, why dont they use their knowledge?
Not that I use Windows or Outlook, but I am annoyed about the ~100 viruses I get every day... *sigh*
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
Doesnt outlook already do this if you choose to view the folder by thread?
This is at least 1 year since Mozilla Mail has this feature, Thunderbird has it also and so has The Bat and Mail.app (OSX)...
I would like to know how much Gina Venolia got paid to find something so much obvious...
This sounds a lot like sorting a folder by thread (in-reply-to/references, time, subject). Is there any non-MS e-mail program out there that doesn't allow for that? Pine does, Mutt does, Evolution does, Mozilla/Thunderbird does... does MS really need an R&D department to tell them that a 20-year-old standard feature would be useful?
... is how many years old now? This must be another one of those M$ innovations we hear so much about:
...
1 convert text-only threading clues to cute graphics
2
3 profit!
Kudos to Microsoft for once again being on the cutting edge of copying 20-year old technology.
I hear next month they'll be introducing a text-only browser called MS-Hedgehog.
Lotus Notes has had this since I started using it at v3 ..Nice to see microsoft 'innovating' again.
90% of my car trips involve buying something. Doesn't mean I want a cash-register in my car.
Bowie J. Poag
Proved you wrong again. Looks like we're shooting it down because the idea is from Apple and Mozilla!
Threaded email? It's hardly new. Many email clients can already do it.
i think they mean the same layout as ./ comments when you set view to 'nested' (not 'threaded')
No, it will be shot down because it has already been done (in Mozilla and Apple's Mail.app, for example, not to mention usenet).
I have no problems with MS software. I have problems with MS claiming this is innovation, when it is playing catch-up. (like pop-up supression and tabbed browsing coming in XP SP2)
1) Release next version of SlashCode under "NOT-GPL"
2) Integrate Active Directory Support, rename it "SlashCode.NET"
3) ???
4) Sell to Redmond for use in Outlook-Longhorn-2005.NET
5) Cmdr Taco... PROFIT!!!
Nah, that just makes WAY too much sense...
It's surprising how long it has taken Microsquish to catch up to Notes and Mozilla
The article ends with:
Gotta say, that'd be pretty nice to have.
Which made me also think that the author was suggesting that this was somehow new.
Its never really "done" until MS does it. I guess because that's what everyone uses, so until MS does it, few if any have it.
This could be useful, but it would really depend on how well it's designed (which is a big red flag, given that we're talking about Microsoft). You'd certainly need some way to disable it.
I work at a university, and I've got a few professors who use their inbox as their address book. So whenever they write to me, the message invariably has the same subject line - usually from a project that ended one, two, or more years ago! They pick that one because that's the first message from me they find in their inbox. I would imagine in this circumstance every mail I've ever gotten from the particular individuals would be concatenated into one long discussion - even though very little or none of it would be cogent to the current message or messages.
#DeleteChrome
To give them credit though, their interface draws lines between the messages for the thread, which none of the primative web-cached listserves do. Obviously this advance in user-friendliness justifies the research dollars put into the effort.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Automatic "Standard reply" button included with the following options:
Hate me!
...but MS trying to pull this sort of thing is just what we need. Maybe i'm biased or pessimistic, but i'm sure that they will find some way to proprietize it (one) and leverage some way to (intentionally or unintentionally) break current email systems (two).
...and on and on. Worse yet, they will believe the error messages that their computer tells them vs. what i tell them. I can't win.
Case in point? Win95 splash screens extolling the ability to "personalize your email with RTF, different fonts and HTML". Because of this, 3 out of 5 email messages being sent appear to be purple MS Comic Sans text over blue background, with 180K of attached animated GIFs. Crap that, IMHO, shouldn't belong in email to start with.
Another? OLE's broken "virus protection". Sure, you can tell OLE to no open attachments. But that means ALL attachments. It doesn't differentiate between *.vbs and *.jpg. Furthermore, it nags the user to allow it to open attachments, therefore defeating itself. Most of them keep their "virus protection" disabled constantly and get nailed with the next email virus that comes down the pike.
Next? WinXP's MS MovieMaker touts "Movies made with MovieMaker are small enough to share via email.". Ugggh!! Around the holidays i can expect a huge rash of support calls coming in due to ppl trying to email each other 1.7Gb movie files.
Maybe i've got a bad attitude, or maybe i'm jaded by working in Tech Support, but it often sickens me the way that Microsoft tends to empower people to do things when they don't sufficiently understand the technology. I'm not trying to sound as if i'm l33+3r than though, or anything, but in the days when i wanted to do stuff, i had to work at it, and if it didn't work for me, i had to learn why. I couldn't just call someone else up and have a conversation like:
"I can't send email"
"why, what happens?"
"It won't send"
"What does it do instead?"
"It doesn't go."
"What are you trying to do?"
"I don't know. I'm trying to send my email!"
*whew*
Sorry.
do() || do_not();
IM, VOIP, email...we're still looking for a unified inbox here folks. If its all IP packets, it can all be managed in one place.
Groupwise has had this for a while now. I'm pretty sure Notes does too. And Mozilla. And Mutt.
An earlier Slashdot article ( Remail: IBM is Reinventing Email ) from December 9th 2003 discusses similar work done by IBM researcher's on an advanced email system. It too aims to put the 'user' at the heart of email processing, and has identified clever iconic images with dots and lines as a way to help navigate discussion threads. But IBM's project seems to be more expansive than the work reported here, covering more aspects of how we interact with email.
You know... I respect this forum.. alot.. except when every fucking response is someones elite way of sounding like 11th grade prom queens. Really guys, try and be* more intelligent in your responses, than just slamming MS, (wait, I want to be cool, should I type M$?) fuck your troll/flamebait tag, BTW, moderator. If the truth hurts that bad, than you can keep on telling yourself jerking off is just "a better way to keep the census down..." I really hate you all... really.
I've set up my Outlook 2000 to do this. All you need to do is go to the Tools menu, mouse over Current View, and change the option to "By Conversation Topic". You can also add buttons to automatically "Expand all" or "Collapse all" conversations. Its very handy - as soon as a new e-mail comes in, the entire conversation moves to the top of your inbox and you can re-read the history.
Montag
Well for a true Web forum style Outlook to truly work, you would want a centrallized server storing the threads. Relying on client-only (or is standard email best described as peer-to-peer with the ISP just handling delivery) programs would lead to fracture of threads. So with the wonderful XP authentication system, Passport, Messenger and now outlook only being served out of Redmond, not only will MS have a large control of your communication pathways they will be ever so close to offering the dream of the internet-gurus/techno-prophets where are applications are server/portal based and client machines are simple tty boxes with expensive processors/memory plus flash card readers but no harddrives. Hell once the world is truly wireless you will just need you Pocket PC and a good calling plan and Bill will do the rest for you.
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
Um, don't people know you can sort messages by thread in Netscape and Mozilla? You have been able to do this since at least 1997. Has no one noticed? This is a freakin' stupid article.
Microsoft had better overhaul their communications/Internet software (i.e. buy it from a proper software developer) before they try to merge forums into the rest of their 'platform'. It's already bad enough that Internet Explorer and Outlook are so tightly integrated.
I'm a bit flabbergasted by this brilliant piece of research. If IBM
... back to my medication.
did exactly the same before, I'm doubly, nay, triply... nay I'm not
surprised at all, actually.
We've got usenet, we've got threaded mailers, and we've had it in
one form or another (think fidonet echos, for example) for years.
From way before september '93. It's just that somewhere in this
month all the new people failed to pick up the working technology
we had, and for the most part still have.
People, it pays off to read up on recent computing history now
and then. It does not pay to pay a big corporation to re-invent
it all for you.
Then again, if we all did that there wouldn't be big corporations
to admire how they empty our pockets for reinventing a squarish
looking wheel _again_.
This particular feature was actually the most interesting part of this article which was posted on slashdot a while back: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/09/145521 5&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=95
It looks like IBM really did reinvent email. Their product might not be the one to do it, but they certainly got the idea out there before anyone else
Been there done that in Mozilla. Nice but not worth the MS Marketing Engine.
How about something more useful like a generic "decoratable" PIM object? i.e. I get an email with somthing I need to do. I attach a date to it so it appears in my calendar. Not just a copy of the message text, but actually the email itself? Attach a priority and percent complete to it and it appears in my task listing. Thus it becomes "data" as opposed to "email".
And for the record, links or attachments from inside a task to an email object isn't the same thing.
- It's nice to be able to see what people are responding to. That's why people quote.
- Threaded display, in case someone forgets to quote.
The most innovative thing here, is their new usage for the word "innovative." The word now has a brand new definition. "Innovative: taking the best ideas from common knowledge and the past.""Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Umm, you mean like this one?
Or this one?
Or this one?
Just because MS has been dragging it's feet for years doesn't mean other people have.
What I would prefer to this is a version of Evolution for Windows so I can use a consistent client across various platforms. Currently I am using mozilla, but it's a fairly clunky mail reader. Evolution feels very nice, but I'd have to run it on Linux box and use Exceed if I was booted in windows, and then it is a case of finding a Linux box that can see email saved to local disk (as opposed to just on an IMAP server).
Additionally (and I don't think this is present yet) the ability for Evolution to read Outlook information. This would put Evolution at the mercy of Microsoft changing formats. The integration between servers and Ximian is interesting, though, if where you works runs Microsoft Outlook servers.
I suppose really what I want to see is the ability to synch my PDA and appointments in PocketPC, PalmOS, or whatever, to a calendering and email system that will work on whatever OS my work PC happens to be booted into at the time. Oh, and publish any business-related appointments to a web page so people who need to contact me can track my whearabouts. From the end user perspective it is the functionality that is the important thing. SynCE is getting closer, but it isn't there yet. Novell - take notice and work on this!
Who will patent it first???
how long until
Email conversations don't mirror web forums. Web forums replicate email...or rather web forums replicate USENET. But USENET has its limitations -- namely that not all computers have a news reader. 99.999% of all networked computers have a web browser installed however.
Strongbad impersonation mode *on*
So just take your USENET groups and put a web interface on them so that everyone can use it. And...ummm...it would look like a web forum. And...ummm...people with a news reader could use it too except...ummm...the people with a news reader also have a browser. So...ummm...why not just have a web forum? ...stupid!
You know what would be really cool? Let's have a web forum where we can talk about how great it would be to reinvent the news reader...ummm...that we don't need and...ummm...that's what we're doing right now.
Ummm...yeah. Maybe...ummm...USENET is pointless except as a distributed backend for a web forum (which would be very cool). But...wouldn't that make this "new technology" obsolete before it even starts...err...is rehashed?
Oooooh! (devilish laugh) Wouldn't that be cool! It'd be like...ummm...IMAP with...ummm...sorting by thread...ummm...ummm...I think we've already got that...already...This crap is obviously neither good nor awesome. It is just...crap.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
I've been using Outlook 2003 for a couple weeks now, and it has this feature (View -> Arrange By -> Conversation). It can be handy, but I typically use the arrange by date feature. It groups by "Today" "Yesterday" "Last Week", etc. -dr
Novell announced this in the beginning of this month now that it has bought SuSE and Ximian and has an extensive explaination of it on thier site.
The only thing this article has made me do was realize that outlook doesn't have threads. I guess I got so accustomed to almost ALL OTHER EMAIL CLIENTS out there having this feature. I mean really am I missing something here? Is there some kind of real innovation/invention there? Isn't this the default everywhere now? How can anyone even imagine that this is something new. Please someone tell me I'm wrong and this is a revolutionary idea, because otherwise this is probably the silliest announcement ever.
Coming Up Next...Man discovers fire, forsees revolution in industry, technology and food preparation!!!!
Mozilla Thunderbird already does this.
KMail already does this.
Evolution already does this.
Opera already does this.
Mutt already does this.
Seriously, this is the kind of thing that is only news to Outlook users who have never seen a decent email program in their lives. MS is way behind the times on this issue, some of these clients have had threading for over 2 years now.
...people will still decide to include the whole thread of original messages as mangled text in the bottom of their email, just in case you deleted all the previous emails and forgot what the conversation was about.
>Oh geez, would you look at this?
>
>> Microsoft invents threaded email
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Actually, I find the fact that they are including pop-up suppresion and tabs in IE with this new SP pretty refreshing. To the day they just chose to ignore neat features like this "because we have 99.9999% marketshare and we don't give a fuck about your damn web browser's features". Now that the lack of these features (and many others) started to bite them in the ass, they rush to implement them (and probably will claim they invented them, whatever). Competition does wonders for the quality, as usual.
cheers.
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
This sounds a lot like NNTP newsgroups. Imagine that! It may become mainstream once again! :P Of course, this is the model that all web-based message boards are based upon.
si vis pacem, para bellum..."if you wish peace, prepare for war"
If you want to use threaded message views right away, it's pretty easy. Open /Documents and Settings/(login name)/.outlookrc and add "set sort=thread"
Here is my complete .outlookrc with convenient defaults:
Good luck!Come on guys. I know reading the article is too much to ask for but could you at least look at the pretty picture. Apple Mail, Mozilla, mutt, pine all have a feature that let you sort the message listing in a usenet-style nested format. This is very different from displaying the contents of the messages themselves in a nested slashdot-style format. AFAIK, these other programs do not have this feature.
Isn't that the bunch of people whose stuff never ever made it into a real Microsoft product?
This comment is printed on 100% recycled electrons.
But vFolders, that's about the most useful thing since duct tape. At least giving you the ability to do multiple levels of searching by dumping all your primary results into a vFolder in Evolution, then searching the vFolder. Outlook drives me insane with its inability to do stuff like this.
I like music
I don't recall where I saw this, but:
"Invent an idiot-proof system and somebody will invent a better idiot."
Future Outlook versions might integrate the nested interface for e-mail conversations.
Hmmm... And it took a lot of expensive research to come to this conclusion? I thought just about every free email client had this feature already--unless there is a difference between "threaded" and "nested" but I can't imagine what that difference might be.
As always, it's Microsoft. Where do you think you're going today?
They're not talking about sorting by thread, which has indeed been existant in several clients for years. Nor are we talking about USENET.
/. post) and not only do the people I replied to get a copy in their INBOX, but they can view my reply and all the other relevant e-mails on the topic through the web forum. Users can choose to either contribute via e-mail, or directly through the web forum.
Imagine a web forum (much like the one you're looking at now). Take a look at the front page, you see topics and short descriptions. Click a topic, and you get user postings (sorted however you like).
Now let's take a step back. I send an e-mail, subject "Party at Greg's house!" to a group of individuals, or perhaps several lists, or even a combination. Replies abound, either to me, or to the whole group. Now, with (for example) Mutt, these messages would be sorted by thread, so we have a good grasp on which message is IN_REPLY_TO which, and all of them sorted under the original topic.
Back to our web forum. Imagine all those e-mails and that same threading structure being seamlessly integrated into a dynamically updating web forum. I reply to an e-mail in the topic (like replying to a
I see something like this being very attractive to corporate users. Make the forum part of the Intranet, and everyone (or a select few) can easily participate in conversations without having to dig through a ton of past e-mails. This would be excellent for people off-site, who could access the Intranet via VPN or what have you and keep abreast of forums that they're subscribed to (read: e-mails that they've been on the To: line for) quickly and easily.
It is a good idea given the implementation that they're talking about. Not a brand new idea, of course, but it is an interesting evolution of a mixture of old ideas.
El riesgo vive siempre!
"Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots."
:-) Irony, I love it.
Love the sig; however, you forgot a comma the word 'people'. guess what that makes you.
I'm kind of new at this game [having just registered], but why in the world would someone mark this as "Off Topic"?
Isn't Cmdr Taco the "owner" of Slashcode? And doesn't Slashcode power the world's most popular threaded/nested bulletin board? And isn't a threaded/nested backend/frontend precisely what Microsoft is after here?
And isn't Richard Stallman's whole beef that there's something impure or pedestrian about earning an honest living writing software?
It's hard for me to imagine anything that could possibly be more On Topic than this.
And lighten up, a little, will ya? There's nothing wrong with earning a living. As I recall, Taco has a wife to feed and cloth now. Imagine that, a married life: For those of you who don't know, it's what you become eligible for when you finally earn enough money to move out of your parents' basement and into a house of your own.
I recently ditched MS Outlook XP for Bloomba: http://www.statalabs.com/ Nested email interface, much faster search speed, and SpamAssassin functionality.
Innovation does not necessarily mean invention. Sometimes innovation is merely making something that already exists work better or more accessible. Gina's UI research has definitely developed somethign innovative in the field of e-mail UI design.
...department to tell them that a 20-year-old standard feature would be useful?
Yes.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
I've been working on a web app that does this in my spare time.
I can't understand everybody is thinking it's about threading. Look at the picture if reading is to hard! It's threaded, but with posts sorted by date/time. Look at the lines and notice the layering. Selecting a posts highlights all other posts in the same thread. And there are some more details mentioned in the text. Instead of stupid MS bashing people should better think about picking up nice ideas!
Wait a minute, hold on, Microsoft is going to basically package a feature which should have been in their products years ago? The only part of this that is news is that it didn't require a special Microsoft version of SMTP.
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
However.... expecting the end user to learn it all themselves, well, they won't, and that's why you have a job.
Microsoft IS responsible for creating stupid users, though... if outlook just told the user a real error message, instead of trying to be clever about it, a good portion of those users would figure out what was wrong, and fix themselves.
The same goes for IE.. thoes generic "page cannot be found" screens that can be caused by a half dozen situations do not help anyone, at all.
Microsoft tries to look smarter than they are, and encourages the image that there is all kinds of technical magic going on behind the scenes...that an average person cannot possibly understand. They like to overcomplicate things for no reason.
Things don't have to be complicated to be well designed and easy to use.
"It looks like you are trying to post a virus infected Britney Spears ass fucking video. Would you like me to help you post a virus infected Britney Spears ass fucking video?"
I don't think this will work. Mostly because other problems with email make threaded discussions impossible. Specifically users reply to the last mail you sent just to get the email address they want. COntent of the messages typically is irrelevant.
If we don't get contacts working correctly there is no hope for a feature like this being too useful. I hate trying to find the name of a person through address books and contact lists. At most organizations this things are huge and too time consuming to go through like a directory. So instead you need to remember the correct amount of letters to type so the name server recognizes the address you are looking for. Its rote memorization. It sucks. People rather just go five emails back and reply. There are ways to fix the contact problems but I doubt we will see them anytime soon.
Of course there is a chance that the feature would still be useful, if all my messages with one person can be seen in view, Its just like sorting by name, I could dig that.
No, this is a good feature. I've been using it in Mozilla for quite a while now. It is also available in the Mac email client. This is MS making themselves look like innovators, when once again we've proven that they're not. This is comparable to them saying that security is a top priority, and then we continuously prove that its not. MS is just repeating what it has always done and always will do, replicate others' ideas without giving the proper credit behind their inspiration. Just look at Longhorn, its not like MS suddenly thought up of multiple virtual desktops. Virtual Desktops have been around for years, but now MS has decided that they are so great that they will use the idea. None of this would bother me if they would come out and say, "Yea, we got this idea from various Open Source projects like KDE, it was good so we are borrowing it.", but they will make the masses think that they are innovative and came up with this themselves. They'll probably do that with tabbed browsing too. I only hope that open source will have spread far enough by that time that people will realize what is up.
-Steve
Invitation only bulletine boards? There are a number of groupware suites that support this sort of interaction already, through bulletine boards and 'white boards'. Groups can be set up to post on a topic, and converstions can be monitored, added to and archived. I predict that MS will reverse engineer or buy one of these suites and call it 'innovation'.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
And who says Microsoft doesn't innovate. I mean this looks pretty cool and the graphic even looks cooler. I am hoping this will get out in the market soon. The one thing that I didn't understand is weather you send the message to a newsgroup/forum/e-mail address and some interface picks up on it and displays it.
I have always wanted to see a combination of all 3 because they really provide the same functionality and can be seemlessly combined with out much effort on the standards part. I envision where all the data gets stored on a Newsgroup type server and then the forum has an interface to it and if there is a reply to the forum an e-mail get sent. So then when you reply back to the e-mail it is the newsgroup address, and that is the full loop. In addition each process can work backwords.
What do you guys think. I am not supporting Microsoft, but the idea is a great one.
...but will someone please kill all the "web boards" that:
a) Require you to click on each message to view it, inviting a host of contentless posts where everything is in the title.
b) Invite the users to implant 100+k images, signatures and icons for each and every "me too" post they make.
c) Have built-in smileys. Nuff said.
A lot of people complain that Usenet is nothing but spam, but if the average "web board" is the future of online discussion I think I'll go back to pen and paper.
The wider adoption of web forums for mailing-list type conversations has been thwarted by forums typically mandating particular interfaces instead of allowing people to choose their own.
There's no reason in principle why clicking on the reply link in something like a phpBB forum cannot pop up your own favorite editor, prefilter the original post and/or your your reply text through your own special filters if you wish (eg. to handle quoting), or indeed allow people to employ their own highly complex GUI app to handle the reply interface in the manner they chose and like best.
Unfortunately it's just not been done in the forums world, or at least not widely enough to be noticed. So, power mail users who have no desire to use someone else's idea of a good human interface will continue to use their email client, even when a forum interface would sometimes be convenient.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Litigious bastards
Why is this good? Because there's not a single interface that scummy spammers can code to. If they want to spam one forum, fine, but there's 1800 other ones out there that are relatively spam free. Please leave web forums alone as they are.
These are the same people who've brought us Bob and Clippy!
Ithink that the "invitation only" part of this might be a bit deceptive. How do you ignore somebody that works a couple of cubes down? God knows you have to ignore most people in chat rooms and nearly all of them on usenet.
.sig somewhere about usenet being in aspect and product like a panicked herd of circus elephants.
Maybe if Microsoft built a user adjustable moderation system, with some meta-supervision built in it would be easier to gracefully ignore the office yahoo. Something tells me that they may have to spend a couple of bucks for a license to this, I think I've seen it before.
Some kind of control is essential, I think. I half remember a
I think this could be great, but I hope they think about it before they do it. Having most of the world's emailers with acess to a slashdot would be a freaking disaster.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Grand Central seems like it would be appropriate for short emails, but the technique chosen for illustrating conversation threads (pretty much the same as the Sort Messages By Thread feature I use in Mozilla) depends on having both parent and child on the screen at the same time to illustrate a relationship. Most email conversations that I really care about are a much longer than a few sentences -- the entire body text of any two emails couldn't fit on the screen. Grand Central is trying to apply a visual structure better suited to IM conversations that take place a sentence at a time.
Now, Grand Central would be impressive if it could parse emails for quoted text, and use that to snip out sections of emails (since a paragraph of text below a quote is most likely to be a reply to that quote). Most of my business discussions tend to consist of point-by-point replies, replies to those replies, etc.
This here is definitely Nobel Prize material. Brilliant. Who else could she work for?
My current line of research and design follows from a simple observation: Most of what we do with our computers has to do with communication, and communication is about people, but if you look at our computers, people are hardly there. At best they're buried in alphabetical lists that are different in each application. By putting people first in the interface, we can provide an experience that better fits how we communicate. In a phrase, "It's about people, stupid."
"Fly... you fools!"
HAD
Not just for a while - for several years! It's been in the 5.x series, which makes it 5+ year. I think 4.x has it too, but I'm not sure.
It's because it's not just a email app - it's Groupware.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
99.9% of the comments so far have been critical. I find this pathetic.
Would everyone please read and digest the article. This is NOT simply sorting by conversation topic, which a number of people are suggesting (Mozilla already does this, yadda, yadda yadda).
To the goon who suggested that outlook 2000 already does what the article is talking about - it doesn't! Sorting "by Conversation Topic" is basically just a threaded view, sorted by subject.
What the article is talking about is separating the conversations from the emails, and displaying them in a time ordered, colour-coded fashion. So, if an email thread splits into two separate conversations, this will be visible in the UI. Sorting by subject will not achieve this.
I'm not suggesting by the way, that this is a new idea; I'm simply explaining what the article is about to those of you (most of the posters) who can't be fucked to read the article.
I expect to be modded down for suggesting that people get a clue, and for suggesting that MS have had an idea which isn't bad.
At least that's how MS will bill it to it's M$ofties w/o, I'm sure, a mention that mozilla, kmail, evolution (I think), etc. have done this for a long time already.. (well at least KMail has.)
I think this is what innovation is like. There were forums and bulletin boards around since time immemorial. Yet, neither open-source guys nor the closed-source guys figured out that forums would be a better interface for email. I think this invention deserves a patent ! Unless someone can send me a link that prior-art exists!
Microsoft invents Kuro5hin!!!
Witness the consistent interface. Marvel at the dynamic threading. Be wowed by the stimulus to content generation.
Boy howdy, I am sure glad Microsoft is innovating here. I mean right now I could access news and discussions from any computer with a web browser. Now that Microsoft has laid its innovating hand on the problem, I'll only be able to get this from my MS Windows box. Thank heaven for Microsoft because I really enjoy having to set up my email account settings on my friends' computers.
I mean if it weren't for this "thinking out of the box" idea, communication might actually take a step forward. Whew! That was close! No one wants that.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
...has an option that lets you view the email as a discussion thread.
I don't use it though.
J
Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit.
Apple's latest Mail.app does just that, there's an option for view as thread that will do just that.
0011 1111 0111 1010
OK, now that everybody has said (three times, no less) "it seems they invented threaded view, duh", can you please go read the linked article? This is NOT threaded view, it's something more complicated (and seemingly useful).
Isn't this similar to a news client (agent)?
Sorry, but I do nto see anything new here, especially that it is in outlook. Futhermore, this will most probably introduce tons of new security bugs to outlook; don't ask me how, but whenever the M$ people try to "enhance" some application, they tend to transform it into another security hole. They have some type of a "magnetismobia" (yes I just invented that) to security bugs, no?
you should check out easynews.com. there are interesting things to be had on usenet these days.
Outbreak Express is resposible for leaking most spam onto the Intenrnet. Microsoft needs to fix these vulnerabilities rather than making even more bloated with more holes!
Idiots!
I'd like to see some sort of Wiki integration with email. It would allow me to edit the message. After saving the changes could go to all the recipients and original sender and they could see the updated version.
Apple's mail client already can organize email by THREAD. It's very useful.
If MS really wanted to impress me with an upgrade to Outlook, they'd take out the damned HTML mail capabilities. I've seen 3 line emails from people come at me, that were so overbloated with background images, fonts and other crap that is not only unnecessary, but, actually distracting from the message they tried to convey...
I like threaded messages, been working well for awhile, but, do it in plain text like it was meant to be..
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It's remarkable what they just did to make hotmail unusable:
1. You can no longer open your messages in another window, (to have them load in the background).
2. Once you open a message, you have to read the remaining ones in order.
3. Once you reply, you need to advance through a confirmation screen, then click to get back to the main menu, where you have to start this nonsense all over again.
All because they now force you to use javascript to view a message, in effect taking away certain web features (the ability to spawn multiple windows, load in the background) and turned it into a single-interface client...one that inherently takes SEVERAL SECONDS to get from one screen to another. I realize that some of this is to drive more ad views, but they've done this sort of thing before without doubling or tripling the effort required to read mail.
hm, limiting functionality, slower response times? Sound like par-for-the-course MS improvements to me.
It's finally enough to make me kill that address, which is annoying since I've had it since before the MS 'occupation.'
...on discovering Usenet as experienced with a threaded,
scoring newsreader and a mail-to-news gateway.
Welcome to 1983.
It looked kinda similar for me. I know why now. Microsoft has invented something that I already have. This basically is private usenet server that requires autorisation. Way to go. Now you should try to invent something as new as Usenet. How about Gopher? You could kill Google with your own MsVeronica.
I have been reading mailing lists for 10 years using GNUS, the usenet client for emacs. GNUS has many other "backends", not only nntp/usenet. You can really read mailing lists as if they were newsgroups. You can configure your "post" to just send the message to the list server, and your usenet kill files (and score files) are applied to these "groups" just like elsewhere.
:) (but I'm not using it at the moment).
GNUS can even read your inbox and split your mails into different "groups"/lists based on criteria you configure, you don't need procmail for that.
And it has a slashdot backend, to convert slashdot into a newsgroup
MS Research != MS.
MSR is just a bunch of different groups funded by Microsoft. Basically a bunch of think tanks.
So the 'MS is stealing this and that!' bs comments are unfounded.
Here is a fact, go buy a clue!
So what needs to happen is for each user to have a personal "account" that displays their private messages...emails simply become another private message. then each user is an author, as well as their supervisor and can "post" their message to the general business group as well as attach information about quality, customer service, etc. then all the internal messages are posted just like here...and those responses are backed up, searchable, and available to all down the road...irregardless of changes in personell!
All you need to improve it is to integrate [like I said above] the email server to handle receiving messages into the system and sending responces to threads out...just one notch above what this board does! Oh and you get to use a browser for everyting too! and integrate it into your documentation and ERP system...get the idea! I just got fired so it sounds like a fun project!
This is just a Microsoft attempt to own entire mail threads and conversations (as opposed to just single messages) which might end up on their network as a result of "Outlook Integration" with .NET
Please stop with the "Outlook Has Great Features" argument. Every MS "feature" is a step away from control of your own PC and ultimately your personal privacy.
OH yeah, you were in News Mode, so your conversation got posted to alt.ms.will.soon.patent without your consent. Just go into Tools, Options, Personal Privacy and check the "Give Privacy Back" box. Click OK, and the only remnant of that last thread will be in Ashcroft's dossier on you, news.google.com and the Bettman Archives.
Not to worry, this is the land of the free.
The Michigan Terminal System (MTS) had a pretty good email/messaging program ($MESSAGE). MTS was Michigan's proprietary mainframe operating system that ran on Amdahl and IBM hardware. One of the features of the mail system they added (somewhere in the mid 80's) was 'history'. You could reply back and forth, and if you had to look back at the exchange, you gave the command 'history'.
Be careful with that axe Eugene! It could bite you in the ass, because if you forwarded your email to someone else, then THEY could look at your history as well. Had some limitations, but I don't recall the details.
MTS had lots of other goodies, including a really nice conferencing system. Details at: http://www.clock.org/~jss/work/mts
A good friend will help you move. A really good friend will help you move a body.
my dad just got a dsl connection, and i ended up doing a lot of updating and reinstalling on his windows 2000 machine to make it, uh, more useable.
...but someone could write an extension for that
then ie died. it just wouldn't connect. i don't know why. so i said he should try out moz firebird until we can get it working again. so he's got firebird, all those nice tabs, fast, etc. really cool. he likes it. he's gonna stick with it. then he asks me if there's any way to get rid of outlook too, cuz he saw thunderbird on the mozilla site.
i have never used thunderbird, so i grabbed it for him so we could try it out. nice! it just *works*, and it's fucking development stage! could you imagine using an early beta of outlook?
moral of story: thunderbird is nice, but im still using kmail. but it would definitely do everything i could possibly need an email client to do, except maybe write snotty smartass replies for me.
"Why is it that whenever Microsoft "invents" something that everyone else has had for decades, it's "big news" and "innovation" ?"
;)
Because they have a better PR firm than anyone else. That, and to most people, it is "big news" because they've never heard of it
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
it can also be called "sort by subject"
e.g. You can access uk.finance here
Some of us don't like forums. Give us our message-threaded mutt/pine. I hope this isn't one of those "no outlook? no email for you" stupidities.
On the other hand, that'd help keep the lusers off our internet.
Hmm...my little simple text email client, "Mutt", has been doing the threading of my emails for years now.
... I can view HTML messages as simple HTML or even plain text.
If MS really wanted to impress me with an upgrade to Outlook, they'd take out the damned HTML mail capabilities. I've seen 3 line emails from people come at me, that were so overbloated with background images, fonts and other crap that is not only unnecessary, but, actually distracting from the message they tried to convey...
Looks like your "simple text email client" might want to incorporate some features found in Thunderbird (Mozilla Mail)
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
For a story on interface design, it is a little ironic that they have the trolling scroll bar problem that /. has long since fixed.
This feature was in Netscape 3.0, maybe even in version before that. Thanks Microsoft for only taking 10+ years to finally add this feature.
Well, cut 'em some slack. Even the headline on the article itself is misleading: "When Words Collide: Organizing Your E-mail Inbox." Doesn't say it's organizing the message contents, just the inbox.
And this idea is sort of like doing both. It's not just that you see the contents of a given chain of responses nested this way; the messages themselves aren't discrete in that way any more. Or so they say:
Personally, I don't see this helping me in e-mail. The branching method quickly becomes ambiguous, looking at their screen shot, and any vagueness (as when Joel G. says something about "getting" the music story instead) is going to lead to too many branches -- the kicker being no one place to look for a clear summary of what got resolved. With an e-mail, I have that final list in one discrete place, which is kind of where I want it, you know? I don't want to have to reconstruct the tree of the conversation to find out that Joel's on the big Charity Ball item and not on the Jaywalking one he started with... And is he doing the Music story? I'm at a loss on that last point, given the example they're using to show me how useful this is. The other two get resolved in two separate places, too. Ugh.
(Add to that the little details, like archiving. What happens when my godawful Notes server runs out of space and I start having users archive messages? Can they only do it by "conversation"? Lots of people start a new "conversation" by quickly replying to an old message they have around; how many screwed up message trees will that create?)
Like I said, seems like chat to me. If people could effectively quote each other and remember to copy each other on messages, I'd be happy with regular old e-mail for what it does.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Yep. And making this feature work better has been one of the cooler new features in Outlook 2003, mainly because of the re-arranged index / reading panes. This was my primary reason for upgrading to Outlook 2003 from 2000. It makes reading through e-mail discussions SO much easier that I no longer advocate setting up an office web forum.
You can see a screenshot of the result (actually taken from Outlook XP I think, not 2003) here.
But don't we already have solutions for this which are as fast or faster than email? I think they call them forums, or no it's newgroups that's it.
Wouldn't this be the same as the Discussion Threads that Novell's GroupWise has had for years? I know v.5 had it and it's still there in v.6.5. It also has IM built into it.
It's the same BS from M$...everyone else has had the functionality for years but no one seems to notice until M$ finally catches up.
And GroupWise is very secure, robust, and doesn't need lots of extra software to run...*cough* exchange...*cough*...
I read a bunch of drivel trying to make one of two utterly pointless points:
- Every email client under the Sun already does threading
RTFA, they're not talking about threading alone.
- The sarcastic "Oh look! Microsoft thinks it innovated again!"
I see no where where Microsoft states that this is some innovation. I do see where it says that this is a Microsoft Research usability study.
I also note that this paper was published by ACM, so I'm assuming they found it interesting enough.
Mutt plus links equals the ideal text email client?
The new Outlook 2003 has this exact capability - a checkbox on one of the Options dialogs allows you to convert and read all email as plain text. If you want to view a particular email in it's original format, Outlook provides a quick link to do just that. Another nice feature is that it won't download the images unless you explicitly ask to see them.
Didn't the old Netscape 3.x or 4.x have an option to group your e-mail by conversation, not just date/sender/etc?
I found it annoying at the time, but with larger quantities of e-mail hitting my in box, it could be useful. I haven't even loked into whether Outlook have this option, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did, and this is a sad attempt at embrace and extend.
-bZj
.sig
Oh..I can view HTML messages. My argument was that there should NOT be HTML messages....not what email was meant for...it provide unnecessary bloat, and clutter to what is essentially a plain text message.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Take on some new product development that will require more money, more patching, more exploits and more upgrade connumdrums. I wish they would fix the programs I have already invested money, training, and commitment into.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Dont remember where I copied this from - I've had it stashed in my saved-messages folder for awhile now in anticipation of work upgrading me to Outlook XP.
0 \O utlook\Options\Mail
Sarah's Windows Tweak Tip: Text-Only Outlook Email
Stop getting splashy spam screens in your Outlook email box.
By Sarah Lane
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Email this story
Video Highlight
Text-only Outlook email
Hey all you email junkies,
I hate big pictures of porn in my Outlook email, and I bet you do too. There's nothing more annoying than a big, colorful, splashy spam page that loads slowly and bogs down your system every five minutes.
The newest version of Outlook, Outlook 2003, has a built-in feature that lets you view all incoming mail as plain-text messages, whether or not they were ever sent as HTML messages. Previous versions of Outlook don't have the feature.
Good news for you Outlook 2002 users! A little goodie was added to Microsoft Office XP Service Pack 1 (SP-1) that lets you modify the Registry to only get text messages forever and ever.
To turn on the "Read as Plain Text" feature, follow me.
1. The steps involve messing with your Registry. It's not for beginners. Back up your Registry before you start, in case you make a mistake.
2. Open the Registry Editor.
3. Locate the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.
4. Click Edit, New, and DWord Value.
5. With the new DWord value selected, type ReadAsPlain.
6. Double-click the new value to open it. In the Value Data box, type 1 and then click OK.
7. Click OK and then quit Registry Editor.
The only exception: Digitally signed email or encrypted email messages are not affected by this update and cannot be modified by a system policy. You'll see them in their original formats.
Want a little more information? Click here.
That'll be nice to have. Notes (oh, how I loathe thee...) already has the ability to view your mailbox in a "discussion thread" fashion, but it -- much like the rest of Notes IMHO-- is pretty half-assed, rinky-dink, and counter-intuitive.
Anyway, using the "conversation" idea in viewing Person A ---> Person B ---> Person A emails is cool, I guess. But it's really compelling to me in Group Member A ---> Group ---> Group Member B ---> Group ---> Group Member A ---> Group Member B etc. etc. scenarios if all the messages are threaded under one "conversation". Then you're talking about really kind of combining discussion boards and email; the "Reply To All" is the "board", and email to individual participants are like side conversations, all wrapped together into one logical "conversation" when you're viewing it. Very interesting.
Putting a little usability expertise behind the whole email experience makes a whole lotta sense in terms of making it more efficient from a screen-to-brain-to-keyboard perspective.
Heh, you know you can turn that option off in Outlook right.....
How is this so much better than nntp and a threaded news client, both of wwhich have been availavle for many years?
Sylpheed or Sylpheed-Claws.
Sylpheed has had threaded email views for quite a while.
all of its derivatives.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Didn't MS announce a couple months ago that they were stopping development on Outlook express???
Who doesn't remember this from the early releases of Netscape's Communicator or the Agent news/mail reader?
What's old is new again, I guess.
API: At 8:34am today, the internet became unusable as massive amounts of worms and viruses spread like wild fire. Initial reports are sketchy, but it appears that Microsoft's latest version of Outlook is responsible. The government is requesting that all people who use the suspected software to refrain from accessing forums and email until the crisis is over. (doesn't M$ ever learn?)
Interestingly enough, Eudora from 1995 had this feature too. Way to catch up Microsoft!
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
Start sending a reply to those USERS who installed the shit. Ask them to stop wasting resources and annoying you, don't ask the rest of the world to remove the capability.
So, given that, I always felt it benefitted a greater number of people to be able to immediately see my response, rather than to have to scroll down the message and go past stuff they've already read. I guess it's "to each his own", but damn, I've just never understood why those who are against top-posting are so much more vehement than those who are against bottom-posting.
is fora! you illiterate clod
Easilly adding people to a discussion who are not necessarily privvy everything else a group discusses is exactly what email gives you and usenet doesn't.
Sure it does. You can CC: to whomever you wish to include, and use "Reply All" to respond to them. Or if you have an nntp server available, you can just add the newsgroup name to the recpient list to move the whole works to nntp.
I hadn't even realized they did this crap, because I use Hotmail Popper. I check my Hotmail account via POP, and have it transfer to main account in Mozilla Mail. Rather than repeat it, I'll just throw in the link to my comment about Hotmail Popper and Yahoo! POPs.
The fact that mutt (being a text client) only displayes text (you could open html emails in a browser if you really wanted but why would you), does not change that the email is bloated and are probably several times larger than the text really justifies, since som big JPEG image tags along.
--- For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -- H. L. Mencken
There's that MicroSoft Innovation again! Amazing stuff.
I'd be interested, except that I know of at least two mail clients that already do this to one degree or another - Mac OS X Mail being one of them.
Okay, two points: 1. Didn't Netscape already do that? 2. Isn't that what Apple did to Mail in the Panther release?
Just my two cents.
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
The funniest example of MSFT claiming innovation is when they came out with some "new feature", discussed in very verbose, obtuse, technical terms as this incredible innovation, but which all boiled down to symbolic links (already part of Unix for years...)
I have studied Gina's work in the past to ensure I didn't step on her prior art, and I'm certain this was at IBM if memory serves me correctly.
Lots of people have insisted that their favorite email readers can do this. As far as I can tell, they didn't RTFA.
All email clients (yes, even Outlook) can do threading. This is NOT about threading.
The article is about HOW A SELECTED THREAD IS DISPLAYED.
If you're so busy that you can't take 2 minutes of time to RTFA, at least look at the screenshot.
OK, now that you've done that, what existing email client, if any, can show a selected thread in a nested, forum-like view similar to that shown in the article?
It simply requires people to stop that horribly moronic "top-posting" style of response.
If I want to respond piecemeal to an email, the only sane way to do it is to write my responses in between your paragraphs. As responses accumulate, back and forth, other readers see an easy-to-read flow of conversation. And "other readers" will include myself, reading old mail weeks/months/years after the fact.
Trying to respond point-by-point while keeping all of your text preceeding the other person's text is hopeless. And fucking stupid to boot. English reads down the page, you top-posting mouth-breathing idiots, not "scroll all the way to the bottom, scroll up a bit, read the paragraph downwards, scroll upwards over it, read the response downwards until you get to the previous text, scroll back upwards again, lather, rinse, repeat, until eventually you get to the top." I call for the painful tortuous death of whichever "human interface engineer" thought this would ever be a good idea and made it the default mode of GUI mailers.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
(A special singalong post)
Just sort by the facts, Jack
Or thread front to back...
Set up to nest 'em, Clem,
Just set yourself free
Subjects are the way to sort,
So pick the best subjects, Mort
No need to lose the story, Rory,
Just set yoursef free
Hop on the flat bus, Gus
No need to discuss much
Don't post that flame, blaine,
Just set yourself free
- Robin
Now we are trying to take 2 modes of communiication and merge them together when talking directly to the person via IM or the phone is by far better. Call or IM me if you disagree and we can discuss it, otherwise talk amoungst yourselves.
I haven't read the details of how they're planning to do whatever they're doing (or the article at all), but natural language parsing isn't necessarily needed for some of this.
In theory, you might be able to split out conversations simply by comparing the differences between emails. eg. Postings that quote and comment on similar-looking text are more related to each other than postings that comment on completely different text. Understanding the syntactic and semantic structures of the text should really even be necessary.
There have been algorithms available for comparing text in this sort of way for years.
'nuff said.
AS E-Rock was hinting at, some people like HTML mail. Sure it's often abused and sometimes so damn annoying (like blue text on a pink background with kitties and teddy-bears all over), but is serves some purpose. Heck, it's a lot less bloated than RTF emails.
An email's intention was to communicate back and forth. There was never a requirement for text-only messages.
You can pry my mutt from my cold dead hands...
;))
But honestly it seems like it's email sorted by thread and put in an IM like view. Why not just use an IM client? (Jabber preferred
The way to corrupt a youth is to teach him to hold in higher value them who think alike than those who think differently
I *DID* RTFA like I always do. The thing described is *EXACTLY* the way threading behaves in all the programs I posted above, down to the look of it from the screenshot, with the minor exception that the messages aren't all shown at once (mainly because it looks like ass), only their headers. I don't really give a crap how Outlook does it.
Maybe *you* are the one who isn't reading the article.
go to http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/mail/ to view the version of microsoft's future product and the "threaded mail" feature!
Maybe I'm missing something, and I did RTFA, but how is this different from what any modern email interface does already? Surely the existence of pretty little lines and dots to connect messages isn't the big selling point here, because I am not impressed. This is the stuff any mediocre software developer knows inherently, yet this stuff is coming out of 'research'? Come on...
Oh..I can view HTML messages.
I understand you can view them, but you should get a mail client that can format HTML email the way you want. Mozilla will format it as plain text, so it gets rid of that bloat and clutter that you complain about.
there should NOT be HTML messages....not what email was meant for
Whatever... like anything else it can be abused or used wisely.
I have seen great email newsletters done in HTML that would be horrible to read in plaintext (imagine if many of your favorite webpages were done only in plaintext).
I have been on mailing lists where you can subscribe to it in 'index' mode, where you get a daily archive message for the list in HTML format that makes it very easy to zoom in on the emails that interest you.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Start sending a reply to those USERS who installed the shit. Ask them to stop wasting resources and annoying you, don't ask the rest of the world to remove the capability.
Good idea! I'll reply to all those spammers Right Away and ask them to please send me mail only in plain text! Oh, I guess I shoudl give them your email address and say that you said it is okay to send you HTML with JavaScript.
Hmm...my little simple text email client, "Mutt", has been doing the threading of my emails for years now.... They had better get their act together and patent it before M$ does!
...Outlook displaying actual smtp eMail addy's instead of Display Names.
Hey smartass, give it a try. My mailreader can't access port 80 so their trash can't load. Plus Outlook 2003 doesn't download HTML content by default and you can set it so that it will display all e-mail as plain text.
Better yet, since you don't recieve any legit HTML e-mail, have your mailserver send anything with DOCTYPE HTML to the void.
Or if that's too hard, keep bitching, I bet soon they'll change every mailreader on earth just for you.
Microsoft Looks at Integrating Operating Systems and Internet Browsers
The Department of Justice "will investigate"
Hey smartass, give it a try. My mailreader can't access port 80 so their trash can't load. Plus Outlook 2003 doesn't download HTML content by default and you can set it so that it will display all e-mail as plain text.
Better yet, since you don't recieve any legit HTML e-mail, have your mailserver send anything with DOCTYPE HTML to the void.
Or if that's too hard, keep bitching, I bet soon they'll change every mailreader on earth just for you.
Nah, I'll just keep using a mailreader that only shows mail in plain text and keeps that mail in plain text as well. Besides, by your own admission your suggestion was a bad approach to the problem. You said we should ask people to only send us text. That is stupid IMHO. I simply only read mail in plain text. Problem solved.
And change whatever mechanism they use for editing messages so that included text goes on TOP and replies follow at the BOTTOM.
Serve Gonk.
The new Outlook 2003 has this exact capability - a checkbox on one of the Options dialogs allows you to convert and read all email as plain text. If you want to view a particular email in it's original format, Outlook provides a quick link to do just that. Another nice feature is that it won't download the images unless you explicitly ask to see them.
Yes, that, until some bozo sends you an "important" email saying "my comments in red"...
HTML email is evil and vile... It's power to the unwashed, so they can embellish their content-poor emails.
MS just copied slashdot 'nested' option.
BTW, Slashdot's nested option is broken...Multiple pages are duplicate. Please go back to original nested mode where all messages were displayed in a single page
Try viewing the web page w/mozilla. The output is about 180 chars long. It looks alright in IE. But he is apparently a MS bastard.
Just cause you use MS doesnt make you a bastard. Preventing people from viewing web pages because you love MS, makes him a bastard.
Ladies and gentlemen, you too Taco. This has already been done, a decade plus ago.
By whom you ask? By a dedicated group of amiga programmers who got together and wrote Thor a long time back now.
Thor so well integrated newgroups and email handling that in fact you had to check the headers before you could tell if you were replying to an email, or to a usenet posting.
And since I'm still on that mailing list, those people will be made aware of somebody mucking with their copyrights before the evening is over.
--
Cheers, Gene
... because noone knows how to quote properly anymore, everyone's previous emails are already nested in every email I get!
Sorry, but the definition and use of email has changed many times since the original RFC was put together. While your belief is that it should not include rich media, I've found it useful in the past. I stick to text messages as much as possible, but when presenting a lot of information to people that are unfamiliar with the topic at hand, it's invaluable, particularly to business users.
What you're saying is that people are abusing what would be otherwise a very useful feature, making it difficult to manage your email. This is akin to file attachments, which are an incredibly useful feature that wasn't in the original specification, but is abused all the time. People will actually forward me 50 MB file attachments. Yes, they abuse it, and it's a pain to clean up after them sometimes, but saying that mail clients shouldn't even have the feature is not appropriate.
Gee, that's only, what 15 year old technology? I guess it's not legitimate until it's released as Microsoft use.NET (tm) ?
"Duh. Double Duh" - Weemba
Need Mercedes parts ?
Emacs mail readers have had threaded displays for more than a decade. Mutt has threaded displays as well and lets you read mail and news with the same interface.
I think this kind of ignorance is not Microsoft-specific: user interface researchers frequently seem to "discover" techniques that have been in practical use for years already. And in their arrogance, they'd never look at something like Emacs or UNIX text-oriented untilities bacause they already "know" that the UNIX UI sucks. As the Windows and Mac UIs grow up, this reinvention of UNIX power user features is only going to get worse and more frequent.
Personally, I think most mailing lists ought to have a news gateway and most newsgroups ought to have a mailing list gate way. That lets participants use the client of choice - news or mail or both.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
... Lotus Notes.
View as thread, it's in there and has been for years. Jesus, so quick to criticise without learning to use the apps properly...
Hey! How come my current mail client can't do that? Shit, now I am going to have to start using MicrobeSoot LookOut to read mail coz i really need this cool new feature. And I thought Mozilla was the beeez-niss. Damn.
What?
Oh Mozilla can do that too. Oh. I never saw that before. "View by thread". Kewl!
OPera has this option in all its releases featuring M2 mail client.
To quote a different thread in here:
You see, the #1 UI wisdom that M$ will never get is that different people have different wants and needs.
Apparently Microsoft isn't the only one who is against providing choice to users. How about, you do with your computer what you want, I do what I want, and we let software makers provide us with the tools to do both. Next thing you know people will be arguing that we shouldn't have non-military or academic sites on the internet because "that's not what the internet was meant for".
that's all we need flame mail and spam posts
Actually, it is in cases with many participants that the thread view is the most useful, if implemented correctly. When the conversation diverges, and explores side issues, those message naturally migrate to a side branch of the tree.
However, what kills threaded mail readers are those idiots that insist on using Outlook. Outlook doesn't correctly implement the In-Reply-To header, and hence each message from an Outhouse user is considered to start a new thread. Arghhh!
Also, some mail readers (such as kmail) have the bad tendency of ordering threads and branches by oldest message contained, rather than newest. Thus, if you have a long-running discussion thread, it always shows up last, even if it contains recent messages.
Well, at least Notes doesn't spread virii and spam!