Oren Sreebny wrote:
One thing that is really important in our environment is support for
LOTS of imap folders - it's not uncommon for folks to have collections
with hundreds of folders. That implies not doing things like scanning
all of the folders for new messages, but allowing the user to specify
which folders she wants scanned.
I've also used IMAP as a replacement for NNTP - where all newsgroups
(and other forum-like discussions) happen in IMAP folders that are
shared, that you can subscribe to. I'm assuming UW does this too? I know
this isn't a very common occurrence in the commercial/enterprise world,
but I believe its popular in some academic environments (CMU is another
example)
Pre-IMAP, at CMU they had a mail system (the "Andrew Mail System") where
when you logged in, the mail client would only show you the
newsgroups/folders that had new messages, and you had to explicitly say
"view all folders" to see everything you had subscribed to. I found it a
very attractive model because I could log in and instantly get a visual
feel for how much I had "to read" - i.e. if there were only 4 visible
folders then I only saw 4 lines of text, and I didn't have much to read.
If there was a page of 20 folders, then I had a lot to read.
Mail clients have clearly moved away from this model and instead show
all folders and mark the ones with new messages with a bold font. This
has its benefits for managing your existing mail (because you always
have access to all your folders) but I still miss the other behavior for
reading mail quickly (i.e. triaging!) I could subscribe to literally
hundreds of mail "folders" (i.e. newsgroups) but I would only ever see
the 10-20 that had new messages. Instead of scanning a big list of
folders to see which ones are bold (i.e. relying on my brain to make the
conceptual distinction between the bold/not-bold folders) I only saw the
ones that were relevant to me, right now.
RSS has become another way to subscribe to many external feeds of
information. At the moment we create a new RSS collection (in the
sidebar) for each RSS feed. The common way that RSS readers "solve" this
problem is to just show an aggregated view of all the RSS articles, and
we accomplish this pretty easily with the "All" collection. Personally,
I'd be interested in exploring the idea that there are distinct
collections but you're not always interested in seeing the ones that
don't have new items.
Alec
I'm not sure I understand what "Chandler does NOT replace your
existing email client for reading and writing emails" means - is that
merely a "what can we realistically get done in a 1.0 release", or a
statement of long-term direction? I believe that our constituencies
are looking to specifically replace their existing email client with
an integrated client that does all the good things mentioned in the
first bullet point along with email.
Cheers -
- Oren
On Jan 23, 2006, at 4:47 PM, Mimi Yin wrote:
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/EmailDiscussion20060120
Here are notes from an ad-hoc design meeting last week on *options*
for our high-level strategy for email in Chandler 1.0.
+ How will people use email in Chandler?
+ What scenarios will it be useful for?
+ What workflows will we support?
Mimi
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