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.

Comments

I think it would be more beneficial...

[remembertomorrow]

if they reinvented mail protocols instead. :/

Plug up the source rather than keep trying to pump the flood waters out.

Re:is it the metaphor?

[wonkobeeblebrox]

Just becuase it is dying doesn't mean that it is going to end anytime soon. For example, Vice President Cheney said a few months agao that the Iraq insurgency was in its "final throes", and I don't see that dying down anytime in the foreseeable future....

Email will never go away, but it is dying in that technically savvy system designers are moving away from email as the best/primary way to interact with customers. Customers may still want mass email today, but that will only last until their organizations adopt good RSS, integrated readers, which is starting to happen.

I'll elaborate:
1] if you were designing email today, you would not design it they way it currently is. Principally becuase of the spam issue, but also becuase things like distribution lists don't fit quite right into the email paradigm: for senders when email addresses are no longer active, for receivers having 40 billion unread emails when they return from vacations, etc. Add to that "HTML versus Text" versions and the filtering headaches that afflict everything but gmail....

2] New techonologies, like RSS, that avoid the problems associated with email are seeing steady increased adoption. For me, I try to get everything I can out of my email box and into RSS: These include news alerts (the BBC, the Globe and Mail, the NY Times, the Washington Post, the USA Today) , NASA website articles / press releases, updates for programs that I regularly watch (PBS's NOW, NOVA, Frontline, etc), alerts from daily deal sites (woot, midnightbox, weeklycloseouts, etc), and more.

3] RSS still leaves a "paper trail". I only posted in this thread originally because Safari informed me of a new /. entry via their RSS feed. I could click on that original RSS feed again right now.

4] Personalized RSS is beginning to happen. Look at Travelocity's personalized RSS FareWatcherAndAlerting capability. That used to be over email and (for me) is now exclusively done over RSS

Basically, any email which is not personalized directly to me I try to get out of my email box. When people start doing that en masse, then the techonology is dying (at least in-as-much-as the Iraq insurgency is in its "last throes"....)

Maybe email HAS changed

[Sloppy]

Since the main principle doesn't change, the interaction cannot have drastical alterations.

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.