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.
...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.
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.
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.
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...
Just use a Mac. Their email client pretty much does this already.
Or use mozilla, or evolution, or kmail, or squirrelmail, or mutt, or any of the other email clients that already do this and have gotten the concept right. Apple's mail.app doesn't actually show you a nested discussion, it just groups messages by threads.
Welcome to 1997 email concepts Microsoft, we were all wondering when you'd get there.
i think they mean the same layout as ./ comments when you set view to 'nested' (not 'threaded')
Not really. Outlook and other mail clients look at the mail header to define a conversation. This is intended to do a better job than that: it looks at the content of the mail as well and tries to infer the threading structure from that.
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
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.
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
Mozilla (I'm running 1.4) does have a "threaded" view for email folders; I find it very handy for mailing lists.
So for the previous poster that asked "why doesn't a major email client support this yet?", the Once Great Lizard already does. If by "major email client" you mean an Outlook [Express] derivitive, the ::plbbt:: to you.
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.
I recently ditched MS Outlook XP for Bloomba: http://www.statalabs.com/ Nested email interface, much faster search speed, and SpamAssassin functionality.
yeah, this is one of the things in mutt i really like. in case someone is wondering this is what it looks like:
screen shot
at least after i've configured things a bit.
-- john
Not really. It's trivial to set up a private NNTP server. Okay, you can't call private NNTP servers "Usenet", but it's the exact same software.
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.
Threaded sort is canonically sorted chronologically (as one part of the sort), and nested/layered in exactly the way the picture shows. The highlighting... isn't normally needed as all messages are grouped and nested so that subthreads are visually related already.
...has an option that lets you view the email as a discussion thread.
I don't use it though.
J
Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit.
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).
Apple's mail client already can organize email by THREAD. It's very useful.
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
Email exchange is private, unless you're sending to a mailing list. Then it's limited to the people who are on the mailing list, unless it's a mailing list archived online. If it's archived online and can get mail from people who are not subscribed, then it's identical to usenet except for the underlying protocols.
In fact, Pine has provided the same interface to email and usenet for ages. Google actually provides a web forum interface to usenet.
The only real difference between email and usenet is what the protocol is designed for. There is a spectrum from one-to-one communications to general broadcast, and different protocols are better for different things. And, these days, HTML over HTTP is available for the whole range. The interesting thing is putting a common interface (Outlook in MS's case) over all of these communications, regardless of the native protocols involved.
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.
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.