E-Mail: It Isn’t Just
For Messaging
Anymore
INF 385Q - Secondary Readings
Susan Harwood Kaczmarczik
October 10, 2006
E-Mail: It Isn’t Just For
Messaging Anymore
• Too Much Information: We’re getting
more e-mail than we can handle
• We want to do more than read our email; we want to sort it, annotate it,
arrange and re-arrange it
• When e-mail is more than e-mail -- task
files, meetings, connections -- how do we
deal with it?
Reinventing E-mail
(Moody)
• Redesigning -- the three-pane layout is
“deficient” for the business use of e-mail; seeing
more is not always better
• Interacting -- from 1900 to 1994, percentage of
interactive workers went from 17% to 62%; how
else can e-mail help?
• Task-Managing, or why “foldering” is bad (19thc. solution to 21st-c. problem)
• Organizing -- threaded messages for easier
Inbox navigation
Redesigning E-mail
(Rohall, 2002)
• Critical Mass: The volume of e-mail has
changed, but the e-mail clients haven’t
• A Good Thing: Adding visualization to
help with navigation; build in annotation
capabilities; more summarization options;
• No Creeping Featurism: Don’t just pile on
features; discover which features users
find helpful
Redesigning E-mail
(Rohall)
•
•
•
•
Threaded Messages: Select a message, see the response tree
Online Awareness Indicators: See who’s available
Clarifying Chronology: Thread-sorting can obscure actual
timeline; how else can time be represented?
More Interactivity: See when senders are online; annotate
your messages
Redesigning E-mail
(Rohall)
Visualization of time/thread relationships:
Clearer than a linear list?
Bifrost: E-mail
Organizer (Balter &
• Filing messages
and creating rules takes
Sidner)
time
• A different approach: categorize e-mail
messages in the Inbox, according to
predefined rules
• Categories include time-critical mail and
mail from people/groups important to
user
• All organization happens in the Inbox, so
no “out of sight, out of mind”
MailCat: An Intelligent Agent for
Managing E-mail
(Segal & Kephart)
• MailCat: An “adaptive classifier”
• On installation, MailCat examines
existing folders and constructs a text
classifier
• For a given message, MailCat predicts a
“top three” list of folders
• File messages by clicking a “shortcut”
button
Ishmail: Managing Massive
Amounts of E-mail (Isbell)
• Java-based graphical e-mail program for
Unix systems
• IMAP - Remote server does the work for
you
• Classification filters sort messages into
different mailboxes
• Alarm filters, automatic archiving,
multiple user personas
Taskmaster: Recasting Email as Task Management
(Bellotti et al.)
• E-mail as task manager: embedding task
resources into the e-mail client
• E-mail as “habitat” -- we’re most likely to
be found in our inboxes
• “Thrasks” -- Threaded task-centric
collections
• Warning bars, action clusters, taskspecific contact lists
MS Exchange: Specs & Features
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/features/
Questions...
• Do you live in your inbox?
• Can you find your way around?
• What program(s) do you use to read your
e-mail?
• Do you think of e-mail as a messaging
tool or a collaboration tool? Is there a
difference?