Hi Jeroen, thanks very much for the comment as my work seems a bit like
sailing the unknown at the moment. The Cyrus IMAP "Conversations" are
interesting mainly because an email thread search now spans folders.
However, as far as I can tell, that development really refers to a
THREAD (reply emails with a common parent email), not what I would call
a CONVERSATION (emails between two people). Maybe it's too late to agree
different meanings of these terms, but here's the proposal:
Contact-Centric Conversation Definition:
THREAD: given an EMAIL parent, a sequence of EMAIL replies traceable to
that common parent. There's no reason afaik for this to be
folder-specific except for limitations of server implentation. A thread
ignores contact references entirely.
CONVERSATION: given a pair of CONTACTS (typically one is the current
user of the email client), some sequence of EMAILS exchanged between
those contacts. Again, there's no particular reason to limit this to a
folder, and the minimum sensible implementation would search both the
inbox and sent items folders.
Clearly the conversation view could be organised by thread if the user
prefers.
Cyrus searching in multiple folders to pull out threads is a good thing
though. It's not clear to me that those developers have considered the
'contact-centric' view at all though.
My work comes in a different direction: what if 'contact' was genuinely
a first-class data object in the email client, (1) how would you select
the contact? (2) how would the email client behave then?
(1) is straightforwardly by clicking on the contact name anywhere you
see it.
(2) this is where 'conversation' (by my definition) appears - it's a
fairly logical presentation of EMAILS with a CONTACT as the primary
context. Alternatively the 'folder' presentation can be maintained with
the emails presented by folder (e.g. 'Inbox = From, and Sent = To) -
this uses existing standard functionality of the IMAP client by
searching the folder based on email address.
The work I've done building a prototype with Roundcube suggests the
contact-centric approach does have merit, not least as it co-exists
quite well with the existing folder-view of emails, and also suggests it
is materially different than the practical implementation of 'address
book' that exists in all email clients I've seen.
I have an advantage at the moment in that afaik I'm the only user of a
real contact-centric email client (although of course all email clients
have address books) and accumulating comments from real experience in a
blog:
http://collabtools.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/contact-centric-email.html
Thanks again for your comment re Cyrus - it's certainly useful to me.
cheers - Ian
On 2012-03-28 09:27, Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems) wrote:
On 2012-03-27 19:17, Ian Lewis wrote:
My experimental effort in extending Roundcube to provide a
'contact-centric' email experience is progressing ok, although I'm
doing some fairly major engineering... The net of it is to arrive at
the layout shown in the attached screenshot - the 'contact-centric'
view is reached by clicking on a contact name anywhere it appears
(otherwise Roundcube still behaves as usual, with folders of emails
being displayed in the preview pane.) Contact names appear in the
contacts list, in the mail list display 'From:' column, and in the
From, To, CC fields of emails. Emails are opened by clicking on the
'Subject', as opposed to anywhere on the entire row.
Hi Ian,
Thank you for the interesting exercise you're going through - while
you're making progress it becomes more and more interesting to me
where you're going with this.
I do have a special interest because, among other reasons, Cyrus IMAP
will most likely -in the foreseeable future- release a feature called
"Conversations" - emails related to one another, across the
traditional boundaries of a folder, which almost naturally, I
suppose,
is most instinctively navigated through Contacts, Categories,
Contexts, Distribution Lists and whathaveyou.
This work is currently ongoing within FastMail(.fm), and though
without an RFC (there's plans to submit a draft for a proper
IMAP4rev1
extension RFC), but if you are interested, let me know.
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen
--
Ian Lewis
Director, University Computing Service
University of Cambridge
office: +44 1223 334702
mobile: +44 7774 017590
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