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.
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.)
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?"
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!
"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.