On Jul 14, 2006, at 3:08 PM, Katie Capps Parlante wrote:
Mikeal Rogers wrote:
I guess I just took for granted that one of our end goals was a
complete replacement for people's current email clients.
I think our long term goals should be as ambitious as possible and
I hope that one of our long term goals is a full email client
replacement. I assumed Sheila's email was more about short term
email in Chandler, and on that I agree that we should be trying to
integrate with existing clients rather than trying to replace them
while I do believe it is important that we have enough of our own
email functionality in Chandler that we can show off the other
integrated features that tie in to email as an input and
communication medium. Email is just too integrated a part of
peoples lives that we can expect them to move completely to
Chandler for email unless we have everything they already use, but
we'd loose out on a lot of valuable users if we waited to try and
attract them until we were totally finished with email in Chandler.
I think we're all in agreement about the long run -- email is very
important to the full vision of Chandler.
Yes, yes, yes. And RSS too, but don't get me started on that...
The short run is the harder problem.
The question I'm asking: Is there a bare bones feature set that
would allow early adopters to use Chandler as an email client? What
is that feature set?
Ok, so after yesterday's discussion, I started to think about exactly
what the feature set would be for me. When I "came in" this
morning, I watched all the operations that I did as I processed all
three of my IMAP accounts.
Here are the actions that I actually did:
* view messages by thread
* delete a message
* select a message and execute an Applescript/zsh script suite to
kill comment spam postings off my blog - I think we can safely call
this an outlier feature
* select messages and use Mail Act-On! to execute an applescript
that examines each message and files it correctly by looking at
combinations of the mail headers - call this "filing"
* click on a URL embedded in a browser
* mark some read messages as unread for later re-processing - give me
a triage based workflow for this
* reply to messages, including editing the to/cc lines because our
default list reply to is wrong, i did work on several replies
simultaneously.
* send new e-mail messages (to remembered previous recipients)
That's it.
There are a few more actions which I do less frequently, which I
didn't do this morning:
* paste text from the clipboard into a composition/reply window
* verify/decrypt a PGP signed/encrypted message. Bear and Heikki, I
blame you... - consider this one very optional
* search for a particular message
* look at the raw source of a message - as a way of doing an
antiphishing check before deleting
* work offline
* send again
* download an attachment
* attach a file via a standard file dialog (I don't do drag and drop
attachments)
Things I don't do:
* compose HTML mail
We've asked this question before, and the general answer was that
email clients have to be quite good before people will switch. The
reason I'm bringing it up again is that Philippe had made noises
about being willing to use Chandler as an email client even if it
had few features and paled in comparison to other existing email
clients. We certainly couldn't rely on all users being willing to
do this, hence the "bridging the gap" thread.
For the work that I am doing, being able to triage and effectively
organize my mail would be a big enough gain to compensate for the
loss of "full featuredness". I know that I am not everyone, but I
am saying that my information management problems are pressing enough
that I would be willing to try before we could match Mail.app or
Thunderbird on feature checklist scorecard.
I agree with you that there is a real benefit to having 'plausible'
email features in the short run, to give a taste of where the
project is headed. It would be great if those features that
demonstrated plausibility actually enabled some early adopters to
use Chandler as a primary email client. (Perhaps this is wishful
thinking).
Well, now you have one person's list...
Ted
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