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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.)
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.
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
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.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
Oh yes, let's throw in a database for no reason! That'll solve everything!
Seriously, what were you going to do with that database once you have it? Read mail by typing SELECT statements? What?
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.
If you ask me (not that anyone did) Tbird's threading view would be a lot more useful if a collapsed thread showed the *latest* message rather than the *earliest*. I'd like to be able to scan my unread mailing list threads quickly to see what's new, not the msgs I already saw! As it is I almost never use thread view.
And thats the problem. Its not built into all e-mail clients. You can't send an e-mail with smime or pgp and assume the other end can read it. We need a new RFC thats adopted by everyone who makes mail clients. (including web based)
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
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!
Sure, you can do that with an SQL database. Or you could do it without one. The back-end storage has very little to do with that kind of system. A relational database is for data with relational structures. Where's the relations you're going to put into the database? If you just have a big list of mails and their metadata, you might as well stuff it into any old file and search that.
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?
"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.