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.
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.
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?
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...
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?
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.
90% of my car trips involve buying something. Doesn't mean I want a cash-register in my car.
Bowie J. Poag
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)
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
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!
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
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.
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.
...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.
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.
No, it isn't just silly.
If you've ever been in a long multi-person thread, you know that writers will sometimes respond to more than one message in a single response. More than that, they're change the subject when the subject of their particular message is different from the rest of the conversation. This makes their e-mails more effective at communicating with the other people involved.
More than that, this research has applications to recognizing the relationship among different mails in my inbox without being limited to the things which a computer can recognize with simple pattern matching. That's useful: searching my mail store is a huge chore unless I know exactly what I'm looking for. Unfortunately, I need to search precisely when I only remember the general outlines of a conversation.
si vis pacem, para bellum..."if you wish peace, prepare for war"
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.
...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.
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
Litigious bastards
basic threading:
message list pane, rmb->'group by'->'conversation'
easy enough... and tons of ability to extend grouping and sorting preferences
of course they are talking about refining the threaded discussion interface to more appropriately apply to email.
Eg. preferences to show/hide how many children of a thread (paging), how to display responses best from multiple parties (group by conversation, sender, date? or conversation, date, sender?)
After all, it only takes a few dozen messages in a single thread to make you realize that a simple nested tree interface isn't the end-all.
but yeah, just about every email app has basic threading -- but there's plenty of room for improvement.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.'
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
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!
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.
Go away and RTFA. Nothing does what is described there. It's not just threading - Outlook (and as you point out many others) have done that for a while. This is NOT just threading.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
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.
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.........
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)