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What's In Your Inbox?
kenoa writes "In a recent blog entry, Gabor Cselle wrote about How Researchers are Reinventing the Mail Client. He highlights some ideas taken from research papers that will probably make it into the real world someday. From the article '
"[TaskMaster] All your emails, drafts, attachments, and bookmarks are mapped to "thrasks". Emails in the same thread are grouped automatically, but the user still has to assign other mails, links, and deadlines manually.
[Bifrost] The idea here is that the people are the main indicators of whether an email is important. (...) Bifrost then reorganizes your inbox and displays your email in a number of predefined categories: Timely, VIP Platinum, VIP Gold, Personal, Small/Large distribution lists.
[ReMail] Thread Arcs visualize relationships between email messages. Instead of wasting lots of space with a tree view that Thunderbird has, it displays the thread structure in a little image. (...) Contact Maps offer a different view of the address book: Senders from which you have received email are grouped by domain. Each person's name is shown with a different background color, depending on the time of the last email exchange."
' " Given that most of us probably read email essentially the same way as elm/pine did for us a decade ago, it sure would be swell to see updates to these metaphors.
From the article, "Bifrost [6], a plug-in originally conceived at Lotus Research, that takes this approach. The idea here is that the people are the main indicators of whether an email is important. After installing Bifrost, you're asked to sort your contacts into five groups: Your own email addresses, "VIP Platinum" (extremely important people, e.g. your manager), "VIP Gold" (important people: friends and family), as well as small and large distribution mailing lists."
First, I get a little chill when I hear Lotus, a pretty amazing suite of software but one of the most proprietary and obtuse universes at the same time. It's not the first thing I think of when considering "fixing" a broken e-mail metaphor.
And is the e-mail metaphor that broken? Kudos to the author for yet another e-mail idea but people's ineffective management of correspondence is their own failing. A straightforward and simple e-mail (gmail is a fair example, not perfect, but pretty darned good) offers the best opportunity for effective communication, not some highly evolved and complex e-mail system.
One system described in the article requires you define and categorize your contacts seemingly unaware this is the old "Object-Oriented" conundrum -- people, like Objects, don't categorize neatly and across bright lines. Strike one.
The author does point out any new or other e-mail system should be easy to use. These systems don't look like that (not saying it isn't easy, but anything with lots of features and abstractions and any kind of learning curve (Lotus!) faces an uphill battle to adoption. Strike two.
The ultimate end point seems obvious, from the article: "It seems like the ideal email organization tool would be like your personal, smart secretary: It knows what's important or interesting, and deals with stuff you don't want to be bothered with. That would be perfect. " Yeah, I'd like that. I haven't seen anything that comes close though and I'm a long way from trusting any software to make those kinds of decisions for me. I still check every single spam entry to ensure I'm not missing an important real e-mail, and still occasionally find a stray missive in the spam folder.
Computers have notoriously failed to solve many human problems (how many of you work in the paperless office?) and probably appropriately so -- our management problems are too human to be completely solved by software. Give me a good clean simple and stable interface to manage my e-mails any day (gmail, Thunderbird, elm, PINE) and I'll take responsibility for the intelligence to manage it.
(As an aside, one of the features I like most about gmail that has nudged me to adopt it almost exclusively is the great google indexing builtin... it's amazing how powerful the "free association" metaphor is in any information context whereby you need only remember snippets and keywords to instantly retrieve deeply "buried" e-mails -- something not easy to do with a stack of real paper mail. Ironically that power is obtained by permitting maximum entropy from the users' perspective.)
Where does it end up?
if they reinvented mail protocols instead. :/
Plug up the source rather than keep trying to pump the flood waters out.
Registered Linux user #421033
Pine still does that for me! I still use pine to read my e-mail and I like it that way.
We still watch TV the same way as two decades ago. Since the main principle doesn't change, the interaction cannot have drastical alterations.
I think that if someone were to develop a mysql storage system, either to be stored locally on the client side or server side (server side beig the optimal choice), it would be the Next Big Thing in email. Of course, deciding which of all of the hundreds (thousands??) of non-standard headers to store may be an issue. But I would love to search my inbox using a few simple mysql queries.
PORN, then I file it away, and more PORN comes in, then more, then more. Then I get a little tired and take a nap. Then, I wake up to more PORN. It's a dirty, endless cycle.
"Hey Gary, why are we wearing bras on our heads?"
In the jobs I've had it has been very entertaining (and sometimes sad) seeing the relationship between the amount of importance a person places on email and the amount of real work they get done. Not what email's original effect was, I'm sure. By the way, I use pine and I don't consider it a tired metaphor at all, more like 'here's your mail, now get back to work'. I like that.
Personally, I am quite happy managing my inbox myself. I judge for myself how important an email is likely to be, based on previous correspondance with that person. Important people get their own folders, and the email is routed to that location via filtering. Simple.
;)
I'm always wary of solutions that claim to understand something and display it for me in the 'correct' order. I think I'm likely to know what is important and devise a solution that is personal to me.
There is also the fact that my needs from a particular email source may change during the week. If I'm shopping for new servers one week, I'll definately make a point of viewing mailshots from my suppliers. Next week, when I'm after a printing solution, a different group of suppliers will take preference.
Still, I despite my reservations, I might give one of these a try; they do sound interesting to play around with. But to mess with an old quote, you can pry my Inbox from my cold dead fingers
"Given that most of us probably read email essentially the same way as elm/pine did for us a decade ago, it sure would be swell to see updates to these metaphors."
So what's wrong with the old metaphor?*
*Not to be confused with implimentation.
Given that most of us probably read email essentially the same way as elm/pine did for us a decade ago, it sure would be swell to see updates to these metaphors.
Maybe the actual process of reading mail hasn't changed much, but there are lots of differences now. Years ago I used to have an "email station". It would download the mail (via fetchmail/pop) and save it locally. As a consequence, I read mail from that PC. Now, all my mail is accessible from anywhere because it's IMAP and web-enabled. This means that I check my mail more frequently and from just about anywhere (coffeeshops, work, kitchen table).
There are aspects of different clients (Notes, Squirrelmail, Thunderbird, gmail) that I use. The ability to schedule appointments and tasks via invitations is useful to me. It's not standardized though so getting it to work with multiple clients often requires manual entry. Personally I would like to see more PDF based emails. There are multiple downsides to it and it's arguably "evil", but in my case it would be useful. Also, automatic saves of drafts in web-based clients would be useful. Gmail does this, I think, but on most others if you disconnect during the compose then you lose the draft.
Thing is, something marked important by the sender might not be so important to me I'd rather that when email is displayed by priority that it is displayed by who I find important rather then what the email is send as.
All email clients are still blinded by the paper metaphore, you put a message into a folder. Messages and folders are not physical objects. A message can be in many folders and a folder can be defined in ways other than what I manually place in it. So,
Let me define folders via searches. For example, a folder that contains all unread email more than 7 days old. Or a folder that contains all email that contains the phrase "Slashdot effect" and is less than 90 days old. Also allow generic searches or folder patterns. A generic folder defines a search pattern. A search pattern defines a variable. Inside the generic folder are search folders for every value the variable takes on. For example a generic folder on "any recipient" would contain folders for every recipient.
There is nothing about the above that requires any research. It could have been implemented years ago, but it hasn't happened. Yes, I know that there are plenty of open source email programs and I should implement it myself. I already code 60 or 70 hours a week. I don't have time to do every project I can think up.
Maybe instead of re-inventing the wheel, maybe just updating the email protocol to do its own base-level encryption? So that all email is encrypted ? So the no-one needs to worry about it.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
Maybe there hasn't been a new email paradigm since pine and elm, because there is no need to have one. This is just a problem looking for a solution.
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Then I propose the spam filter be called Heimdall. Who better to guard the rainbow bridge into Asgard, right Marvel fans?
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Given that most of us probably read email essentially the same way as elm/pine did for us a decade ago, it sure would be swell to see updates to these metaphors.
I'm *still* using PINE, you insensitive clod!
Seriously. I just started using Evolution this week, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how to sync my Nokia 3650 with pretty much any Linux-based PIM, so I don't yet think it will do more for me than PINE.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
I realised that when I visited a website which had you read messages and categorise them as spam or not. You couldn't possibly do it because there wasn't any context. The OMG GET V14GR4 ones were obvious, but others were notices for which someone might have very well signed up for, but they also might have not. So, I don't think we'll be getting rid of spam with filters any time soon (although they do a great job with the bulk of obvious spam mails).
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
You mean like Evolution's Virtual Folders?
I am unconvinced that automatic sorting/threading methods are superior to chronological order for the vast majority of email users. Sure, I may want to be able to bring up "views" of my email that group it by thread or topic or whatever. And it is great idea to be able to tie in related data like bookmarks and files (chronology here is also a powerful search key).
But I think that only a very small number of people would trust an automated tool to determinine the order in which they see messages when they first arrive.
I rarely receive more than 100 messages in a day and I think that's at the high end of typical. It is not very onerous to look at the subject lines of these 100 messages, to triage them and decide if and when to read and respond to them. Maybe some very simple interface (click to remind me to deal with this later) would help but I'm pretty sure that anything more sophisticated than that would be way too intrusive. It would interfere rather than aid in my seeing the overall picture of my incoming email. I definitely don't want my email disappearing into some deep structure that I have to navigate in order to find it.
Of course you realize that this usually only covers the first hop: to and from your local mail server. As such, it really only protects your local username and password; the content of your email is still available in clear text before it arrives and after it departs your local mail server.
If you're serious about encrypted email, check out SMIME. If you're running a modern email client (Eudora, Outlook, etc.), it's probably already built in.
Most of my messages are currently mapped to "trash"
They are trying to invent GMail...wait...
----- I have bad karma for a reason! -----
I must say, of all the suggestions that the were there, the one by far that appealed most to me was the threading visualization in ReMail. That thing was awesome! Especially if you are on a mailinglist or two that easily fills your mailbox with lots of threaded emails. While I like the tree structure of threads, this could be a great companion too it. What would be perfect would be for in the general inbox the it showed the messages threaded and then in every individual email it would show the connection to the others in an arc mode.
It was a shame you couldn't download the ReMail client, I would have switched from Thunderbird for that feature alone. Infact, I would pay someone to develop an extension for Thunderbird that implemented that thing correctly!
It's not the e-mail client metaphor that's a problem, as others have pointed out. If there's a single problem with e-mail, I think we can all agree that it's SPAM. I mean, hey, that's great that people are trying out some new ideas for clients, but I think the current client metaphor works for 99% of the people out there. I find that Outlook combined with Google Desktop works great for my ability to organize my e-mails. I don't need anything beyond that.
What I do need is FAR better SPAM control. I use SpamBayes, and it works fairly well, but it would be really nice if SPAM were handled at the server level (and I suppose, to some degree, it probably is by my ISP, but not nearly enough to take the entire load off of me).
I look forward to the day Slashdot posts the article titled: "Solution to SPAM problem found." I'm not holding my breath, though.
Is it more or this research is compeletly useless as all these features could be intergrated in a Client, and that there is no need to remake the protocol for them ?
I worked on a project (PS2/XBox/NGC/PC game) with a team of about 150. 20 or so were programmers and I was a lead programmer. I got about 200 emails a day. The company used MS Exchange and despite what people say it does a fairly good job.
:-(
However with that volume of email it takes a long time to see which emails need an instant response and which can wait. When your in the middle of programming, getting 200 interruptions a day kills you.
After looking for ways to improve things with tools, different clients, naming conventions and exchange rules.... I basically gave up on writing code and just read emails all day
Linear or threaded inboxes just dont cut it anymore. They work fine for me at home.. but at work I need some help.
When I try to help out "layperson" friends with email problems, the biggest problem is not how their email client works. The problem is that the average layperson at this point receives email in more than one way... and is totally unaware of what they are using or how it works.
"How do you get your email?"
"It just shows up in my inbox."
"OK, let me ask this. Do you get your email with an email client program like Outlook Express, or do you get it on your Web browser, like Internet Explorer?"
"I have just plain Outlook."
"OK, you probably got it as part of Microsoft Word."
"Is Outlook Express better? It sounds like it's faster, should I be using Outlook Express instead of Outlook?"
"No, it doesn't matter. Outlook Express and Outlook are both email clients. They do the same thing, Outlook Express comes free as part of Windows, Outlook is part of Office and is fancier."
"Actually, I wanted to ask you why Outlook just pops up sometimes."
"Does it pop up when you click on a "mail" link in a website?"
"Yes. Well, actually, I think it's 'Outlook Express,' but the icon on my desktop just says 'Outlook.'"
"OK, Outlook probably got installed as a desktop icon when you installed Microsoft Word, but Outlook Express is probably popping up because you still have it selected as the default mail client in Internet Explorer. Now: when you read your email, are you using Outlook? or Outlook Express?"
"It's Verizon."
"You mean Verizon is your internet service provider?"
"Yes, Verizon DSL."
"The screen you are looking at when you are using email. Does it say 'Outlook' or does it say 'Internet Explorer?'
"It says 'Verizon Central.' Then I log in and get my email."
"Do you ever use Outlook or Outlook Express?"
"They just pop up sometimes. I never know what to do so I just close the window."
"OK. Let me see if I've got this straight. You turn on your computer, you log in to your account, and you click on the blue E. Now you're in your web browser, and you could go to Google or Yahoo or something like that..."
"Oh, sometimes I get my email from Yahoo."
"Do you have a free Yahoo email account?"
"Yes, I set it up when I had that Earthlink dial-up account. But when I got Verizon DSL I started to use Verizon, too. One of the things I wanted to ask you was how to set up my email so I can get it all in one place."
"Well, first things first. You're in your Web browser, you can go places like Google and Yahoo, and one of the places you go is to Yahoo Mail, and another place you go is to Verizon's 'netmail?'"
"Yes..."
"And you don't send or receive email from Outlook or Outlook Express, the only time you've seen them is when they pop up by themselves because you clicked on a link?"
"Yes..."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Let's say you deal with internal people (bosses, coworkers, minions) and external people (suppliers, customers, third-parties). Let's also say you are involved in bidding projects, working on projects, and maintaining those projects after they are done.
Now, with the files and folders metaphor that we use today, how can you group all these messages in a meaningful way? You could create folders to sort e-mail by:
- person (one or more e-mail addresses)
- project (each one covering bid/work/maintenance)
- stage (one for bids, one for WIP, one for maintenance)
- or some other attribute
But regardless of which one you choose, you are now stuck. Want to collect all the mail from Customer X in the bidding stage regardless of project? Tough luck. You can't.Being able to create multiple views of what you already have would prove immensely useful.
That does sound thrashy to me!
C'mon, Slashdot, how is this important? Everyone knows only old people in Korea actually use E-mail.
It's PostgreSQL rather than MySQL, but it is basically this.
http://decimail.org/server/ (I'm the author)
It is an IMAP server, so you can use it with your user-interface of
choice (I use thunderbird). This constraints it a bit - the
interaction has to be in terms of IMAP concepts like mailboxes -
but it means I don't have to code a UI as well as a server.
Basically, all your email lives in a database and each mailbox
is defined by an SQL query. So you can have per-correspondent
mailboxes, chronological periods, per-domain, and potentially
things using free-text searching on the message contents (PostgreSQL
has features to support that but I haven't integrated it yet).
Decimail is GPLed and currently just about Beta quality; I have been
using it as my mail server for two years and it has never lost any
mail, but it is still rather rough at the edges.
I've recently created a forum at http://decimail.org/forums; please
visit!
I think those proposals are too complicated.
All you really need for good task/E-mail based management is tagging and a connection with your scheduler. Several E-mail clients already offer that.
Couldn't resist quoting that Mac guy who switched to Linux and now uses Thunderbird instead of Evolution:
In Lotus Notes, messages can be members of multiple folders. Views operate like folders, but rather than messages being placed in a view, rules automatically display the correct messages. Views can also categorize a column header, so that an any recipient view can have an expandable twisty for every name.
> Let me define folders via searches.
This is exactly what Decimail Server does.
http://decimail.org/server/
The missing thing is the ability to easily add meta-data to emails, etc. I don't care what flag the sender sets; I should be able to one-key categorize something as important, not important, whatever. Likewise I want to be able to add stick-note like comments for myself but add them to other people's messages. I'd like to be able to categorize an email not just by the sender's name or email address, but by the hat the sender was wearing (i.e., friend, coworker, godparent of my kid, whatever).
You can do some of this with folders but so far it seems pretty clunky to me.
Of course, none of this seems poised to take over the world, considering how hard it is to get people just to use descriptive subject lines.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Creating Smart Organization Structures - hey, I have did exactly the same thing for years using procmail & IMAP server & mutt. Mails from my boss go to one folder, mails from my grilf go to the other one. Messages from some folder are automatically purged/archived after few days. It's really nothing new, and it can be accomplished even with Outlook Express.
Task-Driven E-Mail Organization - It's useless in my opinion, as it will be used mostly by spammers (you have only 3 days left to buy ....... from us). If my boss wants me to do something within a week, I note that in my calendar. And groupware cooperation tools give a much better control over a To-Do list when working at projects. I cannot imagine IETF releasing new e-mail RFC which includes a X-Deadline header.
Thread Arcs - I doubt it will be more readable than tree view. And I prefer using keyboard&text terminal than mouse.
Automatic signing of all outgoing email. Automatic checking of signatures on all incoming emails.
If it isn't signed, it's spam or a phishing attempt.
Deleted
Have you ever heard of gmail tags? They are as simple as you can make them and do what you need and a little more. (I only wish gmail had a way to apply/unapply tags automatically to the email I alread received)
A db for eamil sounds to me like the proverbial nuke to squash a fly.
Phishing too btw. The signing and checking needs to be transparent, completely automatic. Mail can then easily be checked at every server and dropped if it's unsigned or from a source of ill repute.
Technically it's not a massive problem to do this. Socially it is extremely difficult because nobody uses digital signing yet. We need to start at the client level, automatic signing and checking of every email.
Deleted
Lotus Notes has supported multi-folder filing and multi-view display forever (literally since it first shipped for the view features). Notes' views are are queries against whatever search criteria you define. You can also define rules that will auto-file messages into folders on arrival rather than the dynamic search of views.
For a long time, Notes has had the ability to color-code messages in your inbox based on the sender so you could setup the VIP Gold/Platinum concepts mentioned at the blog. Notes 7 also implements attention indicators which are icons representing whether the message is addressed specifically to you individually (very important) or to a small numbers of recipients or bulk mail.
If you're a project leader (or part of the management, which you were, as I understand) and you receive >200 emails per day from your team members (about 10 per team member, assuming you mostly got the mails from the programmers), your mail client is not the issue. Your micro-management is.
As far as I'm concerned, the only thing really missing from today's email clients is an intuitive means to export/backup/import email by the message, box, or in it's entirity. Well, heck with intuitive, how about existant?
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss
Bravo what I was going to say. I'd only add that Apple's mail.app also has excellent indexing via spotlight, threaded conversations, a good spam filter, spel chik :), and multiple mail accounts. That's all I need in a home mail client. Perhaps more would be useful in a corporate environment, but that's not where I use my computers. Will no one think of lusers? Thunderbird would probably do likewise BTW if you get a spotlight plugin for it. I use firefox and mail.app because I'm weird that way :)
Remeber the KISS principle, keep it simple stupid.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
That's what I would think, too. But when I talk to people (particularly, corporate people) about their email, they say some really weird things. They think they need MS Outlook, because they think they need MS Exchange. If I tell them that Postscript is just as good as MS Exchange, they start using all these groupware buzzwords and concepts that are alien to me. Apparently, there is some kind of weird relationship between email and calendars(?) that I personally haven't used or seen, but that is part of some peoples' everyday lives.
What I'm getting at, is that the main principle behind email has changed, or it's different for different people. The article seems really weird to me, because after my spam filter, my email volume is quite low and I just don't see how I would ever need a complex interface for reading 2 or 3 emails per day. But some people are getting hundreds per day, and it's not just mailing lists and spam -- it's their "real" email, stuff they actually need to read. Wow. I guess I sorta understand why they may need some special help to deal with it.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I agree with much of what you wrote, I'd take it even further: why do we fixate on the threads/tree model?
In extended discussions involving several people, I often see the same person send multiple mails in rapid succession, in reply to different mails by others, even if the separate discussion threads are actually talking about the same subject. I'd like to see a simple system for replying to and quoting from multiple messages in the same mail, so that you can bring together multiple discussion threads when the subjects converge again, and represent this in the discussion "thread" (which becomes a DAG rather than a tree, in data structure terms).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"Plug up the source rather than keep trying to pump the flood waters out."
Ladies. Now you know why mail contraceptives were invented.
simply because their license won't allow it to be distributed as a binary in any free distribution. So I'm trying mutt instead for a while.. it looks like it finally supports IMAP properly.
I see people managing their e-mails as if they are a collection to be kept for months or years. What a waste.
An e-mail is nothing more than a conversation. (If it's a spec or document, put it on a Wiki, not in an e-mail.)
I have 2 folders: Inbox and Deleted Items.
When a message arrives, I read it and either
This is 1-key filing -- the "Delete" key. It's super fast!
I don't delete my "Deleted Items" -- I keep those in case I need to go find something -- which it turns out is pretty rare. When I do, I use "Find" or "Advanced Search" to look for the subject or author's name. It's not that hard or slow.I cannot agree more! As far as I know there is no single graphical email client that would give you the option to sort messages in a thread in a "latest first" order. You could easily do that years ago in mutt, you could easily do that in slrn, why can't you do that in evolution or thunderbird?
AccountKiller
Your wish has come true; although I have no idea why you'd prefer a toy database like MySQL to workhorse like PostgreSQL.
"New protocols" are like "third parties" in politics: everybody wants an alternative, but there is no alternative which doesn't come with problems of its own.
The mail protocol isn't really the problem, at least not in ways that can't be fixed. The real problem has to do with the fact that there are reasons to be able to receive unsolicited emails. Most info@ email addresses designed to be received unsolicited. Fan mail is also unsolicited. If you type my email address off a business card, that appears to the system as an unsolicted email.
No matter what protocol you conceive, and "promiscuous" email address (that is, one that accepts email from anywhere) is going to be prone to spam. You can try to weed out the obvious ones, but no protocol can really reduce spam under those circumstances. And such things are usually better layered on top of the existing schemes; any new scheme you propose to replace it is going to be met on Slashdot with the form-letter "this is why your anti-spam idea won't work."
If you're willing to limit your email consumption to very tight circles, all sorts of protocol changes will help. But if you really want to be able to communicate globally, no new protocol is going to save you.
You just have to take a combination of approaches, many of which already exist in some form but don't have wide adoption: signed emails to whitelist in your friends, filters to weed out the obvious crap, moving the opt-in mass emails to RSS.
The closest thing I can find to a radical change is postage-stamp emails, basically a trivial fee per email to move email from zero-cost to an insignificant cost, which becomes significant only to spammers. That, too, can be layered on top of SMTP, but there are so many other issues to be worked out first (micropayments, public-key infrastructure) that it, too, will be a long time coming.
I would already be glad if Thunderbird at least had features for associating deadlines with alarms, arbitrary notes and tags to emails.
Why is it that there is no simple phishing filter for paypal that ensure that the domain of all the links in the email go to paypal.com?
I think my inbox is too general-purpose for any changes to really affect it much. I get work email, email from friends, email about things I'm interested in, random news, spam, emails from parents and relatives - all of them require different action and different sorting. All of them tend to follow their own evolutionary path throughout my inbox as conversations progess, too.
The Tasking system talked about in the first part of that piece would only be useful for my work email. It basically looks like a way of throwing emails directly into a project management system. Good for work, but emails from mum don't need to be scheduled.
The 'Smart Organisation Structures' just looks like filters. I already do this - email from my managers ends up in its own folder. I don't need to call them 'VIP Platinum'.
I'm hooked on iTunes (dispite quite a few annoyances) for one simple reason: I can find anything by typing about 2-5 characters into a search box. I sort by genre, rating, etc, occasionally, but rarely to find something in particular. I want basically the same functionality in an e-mail client. I don't need a dozen levels of "priority", just give me text search and I'm happy.
These aren't exacty revolutionary ideas. Opera's M2 mail client and Ritlab's The Bat! are both incredibly powerful and configurable tools. If you like Gmail, I swear 3/4 of it was taken from M2. The Bat! features everything that power users need; tabbed search filter, incredibly powerful filtering (I've yet to see it's equal), virtual folders and the list goes on and on. Functionality exists NOW to do the deed. What IS lacking is the ability for people to embrace technology, think outside the box, understand that what comes installed for free on your computer isn't necessarily the best tool for the job and use a little bit of intelligence and ingenuity instead of treating computers and software like simple tools like hammers and screwdrivers.
But you do know who you can trust. Phishing is exactly the type of thing digital signatures were designed to prevent. You know the mail doesn't come from the bank/whatever because it isn't signed by them, the From address is a fake, the key retrieved from the PKI servers for that address will not match the signature. That's the whole point of digital signatures. They guarantee that X sent an email and that it hasn't been tampered with in transit.
Postbank in Germany btw, is the first bank to introduce digital signatures.
As to who produces the infrastructure. Well, anyone who would like reliable trustworthy email system should be involved, that means getting and using a certificate. It's free:
http://www.cacert.org/
Deleted
I feel like all this discussion is rather heuristic until statistics on email usage are actually collected. I've often wondered about how I use email, for example how much time I spend reading and writing email each day. I recently read on reddit about this company Xobni that is releasing an email statistics package. It is called Xobni Analytics. http://www.xobni.com/
What exactly should be re-invented ? Times and requirements change, one of the reasons tcp/ip (and SMTP) are still around and their many comtemporary protocols aren't is that they don't try to do any more than is absolutely necessary. Do one thing and do it well. tcp/ip it's networking, smtp it's routing email. Everything else can be built on top as required.
If you want to prevent phishing and spam then every email address should be registered with a certificate authority, every email should be digitally signed transparently and automatically and every email should be checked automatically by every client application, again transparently. The default mode for sending and receiving mail should be signed and encrypted. And that is down to the client developers.
Part of the process of setting up an email account should be the provision of a certificate. Setting up an account in a mail client should automatically install the certificate.
Deleted
In stitches. On the floor. Laughing uncontrollably. Only a geek who has not seen another person in 6 months who wasn't a cubicle neighbor could convince himself that translating the mail client into Klingon will make it easier for people to use.
Edith Keeler Must Die
At the risk of a one note tune here, OS X's mail.app allows saving e-mail as smart folders using about any criteria an e-mail has including subject, sender, any word within the e-mail, the date sent, and attachment type. In many ways smart folders are better than tags as everything is saved under the smart folder and available instantly as opposed to a tag which leaves the content in the unsorted heap. I've been using Tiger for a year now and at first I HATED spotlight for it's SLOOOOW indexing, but I'm just now starting to grok how useful smart folders are.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Am I the only business person here that actually stores email that is business oriented? I have, in my inbox alone, approx 8,000 email sorted by sender, then by date in Outlook/exchange.
Email is extremely important; its not only a form of communication that is presentably legally, but it also is a paper trail to look back on and find where you were on a project months ago; for those of us that multi-task on projects that last years.
For me, the email client, its search and sort capabilities have to be the best, they have to show me what I want, when I need it, and I don't have time to look or wait, or, should I dare say it, look through print outs of email received in the past that have been stored in a paper file cabinet.
Junk mail filtering is simply a piece of a much larger landscape for those of us that have to keep track of it all. Having a calendar is essential, task reminders, also essential.
Email is not close to dead, as was posted previously. Our company and the the companies with whom we work rely on it daily.
I get mails from Nigeria offering me lots of cash to pay my Valium and Viagra tablets with I get for cheap if I buy them by hunderds. Furtheron I use UW-IMAP and soon Cyrus IMAP for mail storage. The efficience is in the immediate box sorting and the use of the SIEVE filtering which will drop the load on the client side; the server side will filter the corresponding mails to their boxes. Some users can be in the same "group" to send mail directly to a map you have given access to; if not any.
;)
I've got 2 folders; they are "active" and "storage". The storage space is all mail which is not (immediately) needed anymore but which needs to be easy accessible whenever I want to search in it. No need to subscribe to these maps from certain clients.
GMAIL is doing a very good job ; they do break the barrier between storable mail and giving you (and them) to using their search algorithms on your mailboxes.
I've always noticed a mailserver is best served cold with a good quota and good maintenance; together with a good mailserver policy - not just drop and keep it out there till it eventually dies out (which it will never if the servers are reliable). It's great to search through all your previous e-mails to know all your hunderds of conversations but if you use e-mail although on most mailservers it slacks right there... If you have your private server a 2gigabyte box would be sure no problem; if you are on a busy server a 250 to 500mb box is often a good solution; although this could also slack if everyone would be having their boxes fully loaded/open all the time...
Still a pity, years ago e-mail could be seen a little bit like a fax-machine; the fax-machine gets polluted but not -over-polluted. Mostly if you saw "new faxes received" there was something inbetween which was meant personal. E-mails are not so reliable and valuable anymore. Hotmail and lots of other providers are using blacklists which do even block gmail users (ORDB) which is often a very negative result of their users. The users do often not even know their mail is "dropped" into the void; there is no warning, the mail just never existed; unless the user gets in touch with the sender; if he even can. E-mail is also not reliable anymore because you need to filter -so much spam- and even if you use Bayesian filtering or any other techniques like greylisting; there are always catches (like false positives) which will block a remote user to mail to your address..
I did find out it's easy to filter out the known users to the corresponding boxes; which will also be replaced by sieve; which blocks 99% of the spam in those filtered boxes. Furtheron my inbox is really like my fridge; every time I open it I am afraid I get assaulted by one or another living organism wanting to survive and jump on me eating my guts out
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I switched from pine to cone[1] a while ago and I love it
- Similar interface to pine
- Integrated GPG support
- handles IMAP and Maildir
[1] http://www.courier-mta.org/cone/
Need a Wiki? Check out DokuWiki
All this talk about privacy, and Slashdot wants to know what's in my inbox.
The nerve!
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
"What's in your inbox?"
I thought this was a new slogan for Capital One SPAM.
And Baldr is going to stand by and watch all this go down? ...
ME THINKS NOT!
:: Save Us Oh Lord From The Wrath Of The Norsemen
Email is ubiquitous because 1) its Internet standards-based, 2) a basic system is cheap, 3) send and receive actions are simple. However, human communication is complex. Therefore, the "email problem" will not be fixed with spam filtering, content filtering, archiving, RSS, categorization (tags, meta tags, foldering, policies, etc.), unified messaging, embedded presence awareness or desktop search. Senders want to relay information by a method that "works" for them and recipients want to receive information in a way that "works" for them. The media by which the information is sent is irrelevant. Pick your technology of choice. If it works for you, cool. But don't confuse innovative technology with problem-free universal adoption.
Maurene Caplan Grey, Founder, Principal Analyst Grey Consulting www.grey-consulting.com www.grey-consulting.com/blog
GMail provided conversations and labels, two extremely powerful means of organizing your email. Why isn't that on the Re-inventing the Mail Client list? ReMail has similar concepts called grouped threads and collections, but GMail got there first.
Speaking of ReMail... I think Thread Arcs look amazingly powerful, especially with some of the interactivity/highlighting that can be done.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
It's true Nordic mythology wasn't invented by Marvel. But if it hadn't been for Marvel many non-scandinavians like myself would never had learned about Nordic mythology.
Personally I feel that in this way Marvel has made a small but not insignificant contribution to cross-cultural understanding. I loved Thor as a kid, ahh nostaliga.
At home I don't have as much problem with complexity, though I'm on a number of occasionally-voluminous mailing lists, and spam is a lot more trouble. Part of that is because my ISPs aren't as aggressive, compared to my work mailadmins who have a much narrower set of recipients and common senders, but also that's because I manage a couple of small mailing lists, and even though we switched to subscribers-only a couple of years ago, as the admin I get to see all the bounces and deal with the occasional "Bob sent this from his work email instead of home, better add bob@work to the whitelist" mixed in with the hundreds of "Can't deliver mail to nonexistent user fakename@free-email.example.net" mailer-daemon responses to the "Hi, you've reached majordomo@example.com, here's how to subscribe" autoresponses and the dozens of bouncegrams a week when mail for somebody can't be delivered, or gets stalled too long by a greylister or whatever.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
1) Hell, I don't know. I forgot my password. Go ask the government. They have more storage space than I got anyway. While I'm thinking of it, I believe I'll have them back up my hard drive as well...if they haven't already.
2) It's a bearded clam.
What?
It's this: Make people smarter!
Seriously. As long as stupid people respond to spam, it will continue to make money for spammers. Currently spammers have an overwhelming tactical advantage over users (and sysadmins) in the spam fight, because it costs practically nothing to create spam, whereas the toll to users and sysadmins is enormous, as are the resources marshalled by sysadmins to combat spam.
Unfortunately, spam is a business model that works, thanks to people's poor judgement and gullibility. It's not so much a technical problem as it is a social engineering problem.