Hi,
Answer in line:
Mimi Yin wrote:
Can I bug you with a few more questions to clarify your workflow?
+ Are these rules primarily for mailing lists?
Yes, primarily
+ If the above is true, would you filter all of your mailing list
emails into Chandler?
No, most of the mailing list work is just about reading and writing, not
focused on projects per se. Ideally of course, I'd like to have
*everything* in Chandler (so that I can sort, search, tag, etc...) but
for that I'll need a rather full featured set of email functionalities.
+ Do you have rules for auto-filtering emails that represent tasks for
you? Could you provide some examples?
No, I don't.
I think the point I'm trying to get across is that it's going to be
very hard for people to come up with a priori rules that 'auto-select
emails they will want to keep track of in Chandler'.
Possibly... Though if I put in Chandler all emails that contain my
address in the To or Cc fields (minus spam...), that's a rather good
proxy of 'project emails' (for me at least).
In other words, I think the most likely 'Email client-Chandler' bridge
scenario in the Beta timeframe is: Users hand-pick 'signal' out of
'noise' from their email clients to add to Chandler via one of the
following mechanisms:
+ Drag and drop,
+ Drag and drop to IMAP folder
+ Flag emails + set up IMAP folder to automatically pick up flagged items
That sounds about right.
BONUS scenario:
+ Select a few rule-based IMAP folders that are of great importance to
me to auto-dump all emails in that folder into Chandler. e.g. I might
do that with the design list because basically every email to the
design list is a task on my todo list.
Performance-wise, in the Beta timeframe, is Chandler going to be ready
to deal with all of the noise from people's email clients as well as
the signals? (My worry is that if people start populating Chandler
with rule-based IMAP folders, they will end up with a lot of noise in
Chandler.)
If we have such a perf challenge (whether the repo has issues or the UI
workflow is inadequate), we better know about this *now*. I mean: the
sooner we address those, the better. Having to struggle with them before
we implement a complete email client is a good thing IMHO.
Personally, from a design standpoint, I don't feel that Chandler will
be ready to deal with both noise AND signal. The NOW section of the
Dashboard (given the design we have in the Alpha 4 spec) could be
easily overwhelmed with too many irrelevant emails.
Well, may be we shouldn't get everything in NOW per default then. I
mentioned in a design session that, IMO, having a Not Triaged status was
important. To me at least, the 3 important status are Now, Later and Not
Triaged. Done is not very important (shouldn't be under my nose at
least, more like some sort of archive status).
I think it's great that you would move task management workflows over
to Chandler, but I'm not sure we can depend on all users to do that. I
think we need to provide users with workflow ramps to gently nudge
them towards depending on Chandler more and more over time by allowing
them to keep their umbilical cord to their Inbox / Task list intact.
I might be an extreme case but, of course, I have a special motivation
to make this work!... :) That being said, my intention is to have all
task management workflow in Chandler. Having only part of it seems
really hard to manage quite frankly...
It seems like the optimal workflow would be to set up a rule to
'Copy' flagged items to the Chandler IMAP folder, while
allowing users to keep an eye on flagged items in their Inbox.
Yes, I think I agree with you. It would allow the maximum flexibility
and wouldn't prevent me to "move" instead of "copy" those emails if I
really wanted to. Looks like the place where an "à la Chris" extension
would be a great help (a "mark for Chandler to pick" button in the
Thunderbird toolbar). Having this extension for Outlook would be a
better angle though from a market share standpoint.
Cheers,
- Philippe
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