Why Email Clients Need to Change
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
I hate repetition, and have scripted my most common actions. I guess I've hacked my email system.
For archiving I just put it all in either a project specific repository or a single folder called "other". I can then search for keywords, but I usually pop out to a command line and grep for things if I need them.
I'm sure there's more available in existing systems, but the Bayesian classifiers also work as spam filters. I wrote them years ago and they are a great tool to have to hand.
Thanks for the interest. It never really occured to me that someone would be interested.
As far as separating them, though, I suspect it really isn't that hard. Automated notifications tend to have some pretty distinctive phrases in them, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if you could get a Bayesian network to do an adequate job of separating them for you.
The author needs to learn how to use filters.
"if subject contains analytics apply label alert"
"if subject contains facebook skip the inbox"
Thus, first step toward what Alister says, could be done by defining patterns and associate gmail filters and searches to it.
AI and NLP could have to be used sometime in the future. But for now import and export of filters should do quite a bit of it.
Literally each gmail user has to set filters for himself. Rather if it could be configured via a workflow and associated with user inbox, it would be a long way for a better email client.
There's a fair amount of deduction goes into Gmail's conversation ordering -- it's quite hard to fool -- and an API that allowed you to treat conversations as the primary unit instead of messages would be great.
This article is right that the inbox needs to get smarter, and GMail is the closest to it yet. But while they're furiously adding frills around the outside, they've made very little changes of the sort suggested. Even easy things are missing: eg, why can't I click on a "from" header and automatically see all messages sent from that person?
In fact, it's mostly small changes like this that could bring GMail much closer to what the author is looking for. Sure, being able to pull in Facebook interactions isn't going to happen, but a desktop client could certainly do that. Which brings us back to hoping for a GMail API.
Oh, you mean that useless representation that breaks down as soon as a third party gets involved and that google forces upon us even in their abysmal "groups" product that everyone insists on using nowadays?
Referring to conversations as "threading done right" is the worst joke I've heard in a while. It's subset of what most e-mail clients already do with their collapsible threading based on message-id and subject and could be trivially added to same mail clients without loosing the advantages of real threading.
The reason why that hasn't happened (except in niche products) is because most people just don't consider it a worthwhile feature. It has actually done more harm than good to the e-mail ecosystem because it encourages TOFU which annoys the hell out of people using regular mail clients and completely blows up on mailing lists.
Edit: I just learned that outlook apparently has a conversation view. Well, why am I not surprised...
That means I see the entire back-and-forth on one page, including my replies, not a basket full of subject lines I have to click through. Even just getting my replies into a thread seems beyond most mail clients that I've seen (short of a client-killing smart basket that includes my monster sent mail folder).
Still, though, I did say there were holdouts. Hi there.
As you've apparently never used a desktop mail client before, here's a screenshot of what the tinydns mailing list looks like for me: http://is.gd/uumd
I have no idea what you mean by "treats conversations as units". The same could be said for any threaded view I guess. Except that the threaded view also exposes the nesting, which is quite a bit more helpful on mailing lists than a flat view that jumps randomly between levels.
That means I see the entire back-and-forth on one page, including my replies, not a basket full of subject lines I have to click through.
Yes, that's nice and fancy for 1:1 conversations.
Once you participate in a mailing list you'll happily trade in the lazyness for a structured view with defined anchors that provides some clues about what point and nesting level of the conversation you're currently looking at.
Even just getting the replies into a thread seems beyond most mail clients that I've seen.
As you can see in my screenshot this works just fine. In fact it has been working fine for almost 30 years. Usenet is based on this mechanism. Did "most E-mail clients you have seen" happen to be web-based?
[Edit since I'm now on a real keyboard]
I have no idea what you mean by "treats conversations as units". The same could be said for any threaded view I guess.
What I mean is that the atom of the mail client is an entire conversation. So when I move it to another folder (or label it in Gmail parlance) all the related messages get grouped, or flagged or whatever. You can do some operations at an individual message level so the metaphor's not overpoweringly intrusive, but for general day-to-day operation, the conversation is the unit you deal with.
Except that the threaded view also exposes the nesting, which is quite a bit more helpful on mailing lists than a flat view that jumps randomly between levels.
There's nothing about conversations that prevents this. Look at Hacker News: it has both all-posts-on-a-page and nesting. Would you prefer that the comments view was just a list of timestamps and poster names and you had to individually click each one to see the comment? No? Yet that's what most mailing list clients and archives make you do.
Yes, that's nice and fancy for 1:1 conversations.
... which are the primary use of email for millions of people. I'm not sure why you're so quick to condemn something that would be such a massive leap in usability for so many email users and that doesn't exclude your preferred method of operation.
I personally prefer to read mailing lists and usenet in thread-to-page, just as I prefer to see the contents of online comment threads and instant messages all in one screenful. You may not. But as you've said, virtually every half-decent mail client of the past 30 years can handle message-level threading.
But I want more. I actually wonder if the prevalence of mailing list-centric attitudes like yours among engineers is the reason we don't have mail clients with proper conversations yet. I actually suspect that it's still simply too hard: you have to sort and search potentially tens of thousands of messages just to display one conversation, and the easier route is just to make the human do the work. But I'd far rather my (or Google's) computer did it for me.
I fail to see a massive difference beyond extraordinary lazyness there.
I don't normally want to see a full thread at a time. It can make sense in a web-frontend where page refreshes take annoyingly long, but other than that I see more drawbacks than benefits in my workflow.
What I mean is that the atom of the mail client is an entire conversation. So when I move it to another folder (or label it in Gmail parlance) all the related messages get grouped, or flagged or whatever.
Again, that's nice but no difference to desktop mail clients.
There's nothing about conversations that prevents this. Look at Hacker News: it has both all-posts-on-a-page and nesting. Would you prefer that the comments view was just a list of timestamps and poster names and you had to individually click each one to see the comment? No? Yet that's what most mailing list clients and archives make you do.
You said "No" where I say "Yes". I have no problem pressing a single key between reading comments. I like seeing which comments I have already read. I like seeing which comments I have replied to. I like to flag comments that I might want to come back to later. I like archieving stuff, arranging it in folders or forwarding it by e-mail. I like attachments. Yes, I love all the features that have evolved in online discussion over the last two decades and would prefer if HN was a mailing list or newsgroup.
Unfortunately that's not mass compatible because most kids these days have unlearned what a newsreader is. Hence we are stuck with the poor substitute of a web forum (and not a particularly good one, as even PG will probably admit, unknown or expired link, eh?).
I'm not sure why you're so quick to condemn something that would be such a massive leap in usability for so many email users and that doesn't exclude your preferred method of operation.
I'm condemning it because it's a step backwards not forwards and affects me, as I have to deal not only with the outlook TOFU idiots but also with the gmail TOFU idiots now. Google of all companies should know better, but "fancy" won over "sensible" one more time.
But I want more. I actually wonder if the prevalence of mailing list-centric attitudes like yours among engineers is the reason we don't have mail clients with proper conversations yet.
It's called "clue". Engineers tend to also be the most extensive users of e-mail. Most mailing lists happen between technical people. Many E-Mail Clients are under active development. If conversation views were considered a worthwhile feature then we'd be having it everywhere by now. The implementation effort is minimal.
I actually suspect that it's still simply too hard: you have to sort and search potentially tens of thousands of messages just to display one conversation, and the easier route is just to make the human do the work. But I'd far rather my (or Google's) computer did it for me.
That's nonsense. Most MUAs are already tracking "conversations" as you call them and have done so for 20 years. It's just that most haven't bothered to display the threads in a "conversation view" way, because most heavy e-mail users [that I know of] don't find that view particularly useful.
"Laziness" is a key component of usability -- nearly all efficiency improvements can be dismissed as "just for the lazy", well back before the dawn of computers. Who needs an electronic starter for their car anyway? Surely a crank handle is fine?
I'm condemning it because it's a step backwards not forwards and affects me, as I have to deal not only with the outlook TOFU idiots but also with the gmail TOFU idiots now. Google of all companies should know better, but "fancy" won over "sensible" one more time.
It shouldn't affect you at all -- you can carry on plodding through your messages one by one in your client, and shaking your fist at TOFU from your porch recliner. But the TOFU battle is (sadly) lost, thanks to Outlook and later Gmail. Increasing client usability isn't going to affect that fight one jot.
Engineers tend to also be the most extensive users of e-mail. Most mailing lists happen between technical people. Many E-Mail Clients are under active development. If conversation views were considered a worthwhile feature then we'd be having it everywhere by now. The implementation effort is minimal.
And yet when you view a Bugzilla thread on the web, you see all the replies in a single page. I agree that if conversation views were considered a worthwhile feature by engineers we'd be seeing it everywhere by now. But this is simply proving to be another case where the use case of the vast majority of engineers is wildly different to the end-user case. Google Groups, as you pointed out above, is also incredibly popular among technical people. You can't see a reason why (though you'll doubtless have something condescending to mention about youth or branding) because you refuse to accept that it may be popular for a reason.
Most MUAs are already tracking "conversations" as you call them and have done so for 20 years.
No, no they aren't, as you'd see if you deigned to take the time to consider what a conversation actually is, an understanding you simply don't have as evidenced by your screenshot above. It's not a dumb subject-based sort, nor is simply header-based or a combination of the two. Crucially, it includes messages sent by the reader -- which is where the work is for the client: it has to sort through the entire local sent archive to render the conversation. Can you name a single client that has done this for 20 years?
Clearly, this a love-hate feature. For the haters, there is ... ooh, every mail client ever. For those who love it, there is, well, GMail. Something's amiss there, especially when adding the feature would barely impact on haters.
Interesting observation and no, the TOFU battle is in no way lost. It has just become a much more frequent annoyance again recently, after it had almost disappeared for a while. Thanks gmail!
Try posting TOFU to any respectable mailing list and you'll get the appropiate responses. People don't suddenly begin to tolerate idiocy only because a new broken client comes along.
No, no they aren't, as you'd see if you deigned to take the time to consider what a conversation actually is, an understanding you simply don't have as evidenced by your screenshot above. It's not a dumb subject-based sort, nor is simply header-based or a combination of the two. Crucially, it includes messages sent by the reader -- which is where the work is for the client: it has to sort through the entire local sent archive to render the conversation. Can you name a single client that has done this for 20 years?
Well, technically it's quite a trivial problem for any MUA that already has a search index - which would be most of them.
So the question would not be why couldn't they do it but rather why did nobody care to implement it, even years after gmail came along.
Maybe people who care enough to use a desktop mail client just have better ways to organize their stuff?
This is what's so perplexing about this argument, and I'm clearly not articulating what I think matters here, unless I'm just getting downmodded for my opinion. Because I care enough to use a desktop mail client, and also dislike top-posting in most cases, and am pretty anal about filing. But conversation view is a great help with all of these areas, and they're where I most keenly feel its absence.
And -- if we can set Tofu aside for a moment as a social problem -- I don't see that adding conversations would detract from the email client experience in any way. Sure GMail did it in a polarising use-it-or-leave fashion, but as an optional extra it makes a great deal of sense to me.
I mean, seriously, consider the other remotely similar forms of digital conversation we have, like instant messaging. Imagine that an IM client forced you to look in a separate place to see what you'd said, and only showed you a single post from your correspondent at once. It's ludicrous. Similarly, compare the iPhone's (or any other threaded) SMS app to the old standard of single-text-at-a-time. There's simply no comparison.
So, no, I don't think it's that "people who care" have better ways, though I strongly suspect they believe they do. Oh well. Perhaps a GMail API will come along eventually.
You just need to write a wrapper class to retrieve whatever info you need from the mail servers over IMAP vs a usual data API.