Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Marvel fans? Last time i checked, Nordic mythology wasn't invented by marvel.
"back in the day" mutt did not exist. And elm was painful.
You mean like Evolution's Virtual Folders?
That's what DBMail http://www.dbmail.org/ does and I thought Dovecot was planning to do it too.
pine is indeed pretty decent. As a 16-year old it was my first mail client on a free local internet service, it was the only thing they offered. But now I still use it, it has very easy and fast search and sort abilities, even though I have about 8000 entries in my inbox, it can handle it in no time. One of the better features is the 'role' option, incoming mail from certain adresses can be default be replied to with a completely different header and signature. Still, for the user, everything is saved in the same client. It can automatically handle graphic attachments by calling other programs, and probably urls as well although I never really bothered to configure that. All in all, it's a full-grown "graphical" interface for mail, and I didn't find anything yet that could handle what pine does as fast and efficiently.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
If you are on a Mac the Daylite Productivity Suite is an interesting step forward. It has pretty neat mail integration. Disclaimer : I am in no way affiliated with MarketCircle.
MLT - simple and robust open source multimedia framework for Linux
You might want to check out the Smart Folders that come with Apple Mail. Not the fastest solution for me on my iBook, and the queries that you can perform are very basic, but it has some of the features that you've discussed, like "a folder that contains all email that contains the phrase "Slashdot effect" and is less than 90 days old".
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.
Indeed. My guess is that the ever-increasing need for the New And Improved(TM) has to do with people not wanting to take the time or trouble to use (and/or learn) their computers.
Someone make this easier, because thinking is too hard. Just give me a button to click!
Personally, I use mutt along with the usual fetchmail->procmail->mbox routine. Searching, sorting, filtering, copying, moving all with braindead easy-to-use vi keystrokes. Visualising relationships? LOL. How about filtering using a regular expression?
What else could I possibly need? Aside from dealing with brain-dead, misconfigured clients sending emails that wind up in my inbox with spam footers attached, I couldn't be happier. Standard tools, standard formats.
In Mozilla Thunderbird searches can be saved as a folder.
Passing silhouettes of strange illuminated mannequins
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.
SMIME and OpenPGP are both standards. What makes you think that a new standard is going to be adopted any faster?
The barrier to wide spread encryption is key management. Key management is hard and there is no perfect solution. A full fledged PKI is would be easiest for most users and could provide sealess encryption. But who manages the PKI? Will a government be able to recover the key with a search warrent? There are some serious privacy problems to overcome. PGP/GPG gives users full control over their keys which is great from a privacy point of view, but the management is hard. Most users don't want to manage their on keys. Worse, many users won't understand how to properly manage keys which will make the system essentially useless. (Many current PGP/GPG users mismanage their keys and they should know better.) PGP/GPG also has key distribution and trust issues.
For example a generic folder on "any recipient" would contain folders for every recipient.
Thunderbird has something similar to this though it's not quite as flexible. It's called "group by sort".
What you do is, for example, go into your inbox and sort by sender name. Then go to View -> Sort by -> Group by sort. What you'll find is that your inbox now has a collapsible "tree" view of all the people who have sent you mail. They act kinda like subfolders but not really. And I find it limited because it'll consider sender "Bob <bob@example.com>" as being a different person from "bob@example.com". Oh yeah, and it screws up the threading. right... But, you know, the idea is there.
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/
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