Innovative email client design: Thinking outside the Outlook box
Gabor Cselle has posted some examples 
of innovative email client design which break the three-pane “Folder -> Email list -> Selected Message” design straight-jacket, popularised by Outlook (and now also available in Mail.app).
The central problem with email clients, he suggests, is not getting rid of Junk emails; it’s learning how to deal more cleverly and efficiently with what’s left:
Today, we seem to be at a point where it seems like we might be able to solve the spam problem. But the problem of figuring out which of the non-spam emails is important, and what it relates to, still exists.
He presents three creative attempts to solve that problem.
TaskMaster , developed by XEROX at PARC in 2003, puts your tasks at the top of the hierarchy, with emails and attachments related to that task grouped underneath:
Click image for a full-sized view
Bifrost from Lotus Research organises email on the basis of who sent it, rather like Microsoft’s SNARF project. It relies on you to nominate important contacts and organise contacts by their various relationships to you. After that, email is orgnaised for you in a “social” or relationship-based hierarchy.
Lastly he considers “cool features” like contact maps and thread arcs in ReMail from IBM , both of which structure your emails or contacts in more useful ways than the folder-email-selected email model:
Your mind does stop for a minute when you read something like this.
You suddenly realise how much time you spend making the three-tiered model work for your needs. You get to imagine for a moment what it would be like if the email client worked for you rather than you for it.
Tags: Apple Mail, deisgn, email, Email Client, mail.app, outlook, Productivity, three-pane, UI design, usabilityRelated posts
July 10th, 2006 at 1:53 am
GNUMail does those threading arcs:
http://www.collaboration-world.com/gnumail.data/screenshots/v1.2.0pre1/gnumail-osx.png
July 10th, 2006 at 3:19 am
very interesting… but it makes my head hurt! i like the green to read task/deadline tracker. but thinking about mail as a component of tasks, while it makes sense, it’s a turn around. something i’ve been doing lately which is similar to this utilizes the already existing power of tiger.
my project manager is spotlight. i keep a spotlight search open at all times. every project gets a keyword combo the day i start it. every single file, email, ical task, contact (via the notes field) gets this keyword… examples of current projects: valeriejune, truestorypictures, dandee. if i type in any of those into my already open spotlight window (project manager window as i’ve come to think of it) i get all associated emails, contacts, ical events/todos, files, folders… all of it. in a second. so sweet.
the only down side of this is one little ical/spotlight bug. all ical events/todos, in the spotlight window, show up with “No Date” as their date. Ideally I want to be able to filter my find with today, yesterday, this week, etc. and not loose my ical objects. as it is now i have to show all dates because as soon as i filter for a date the “No Date” status of ical objects makes them disappear.
in any case, spotlight as project manager, is quite powerful assuming you consistently tag. i’ve found that now that it is my workflow the tagging is easy and immediate thanks to mailtags and quicksilver’s “set comment” function for files.
July 10th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
The hope of many in the anti-spam community is that once the spam problem is solved enough to make spending more time on it inefficient, the same technology can be used to process non-junk email.
POPfile [http://popfile.sf.net], for example, can filter spam, but the real value is that it can filter mail into user-defined categories. Even better than this would be a filter that doesn’t need the user to define categories (auto-categorisation is done in plenty of statistical work), and that tagged rather than filtered. This is only the start of what can be done.
July 10th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
How Researchers are Reinventing the Mail Client…
Gabor Cselle has posted an overview of several different approaches researchers have taken to re-designing email, breaking it down into three categories: task driven email, smart email organization structures, and cool features. It’s always interestin…
July 10th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
I’m not satisfied with a limited definition of the spam problem that believes it will be “solved enough” by anti-spam technology like you’re referring to.
July 10th, 2006 at 7:52 pm
You’re saying that if technology is useful for processing non-junk email it is by definition unsatisfactory for solving the spam problem? That’s a pretty limited point of view.
July 10th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
In regards to threading, Mail.app seems limited to two options: turning it on and off, and collapsing/expanding threads. Is there a way in Mail.app to reorder emails in a thread, or specially add and delete emails to a particular thread?
Actually, does any current Mac or Unix email client you know of allow this?
July 11th, 2006 at 2:52 am
No, I’m disagreeing with how “spam problem” is defined.