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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.)
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
You mean like Evolution's Virtual Folders?
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
"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.