EMail: It Isnt Just For Messaging Anymore

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E-Mail It Isnt Just For Messaging Anymore

• INF 385Q - Secondary Readings
• Susan Harwood Kaczmarczik
• October 10, 2006

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E-Mail It Isnt Just For Messaging Anymore

• Too Much Information Were getting more e-mail
  than we can handle
• We want to do more than read our e-mail 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?

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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 (19th-c.
  solution to 21st-c. problem)
• Organizing -- threaded messages for easier Inbox
  navigation

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Redesigning E-mail (Rohall, 2002)

• Critical Mass The volume of e-mail has changed,
  but the e-mail clients havent
• A Good Thing Adding visualization to help with
  navigation build in annotation capabilities
  more summarization options
• No Creeping Featurism Dont just pile on
  features discover which features users find
  helpful

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Redesigning E-mail (Rohall)

• Threaded Messages Select a message, see the
  response tree
• Online Awareness Indicators See whos 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

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Redesigning E-mail (Rohall)
Visualization of time/thread relationshipsCleare
r than a linear list?
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Bifrost E-mail Organizer (Balter Sidner)

• Filing messages and creating rules takes 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

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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

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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

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Taskmaster Recasting E-mail as Task Management
(Bellotti et al.)

• E-mail as task manager embedding task resources
  into the e-mail client
• E-mail as habitat -- were most likely to be
  found in our inboxes
• Thrasks -- Threaded task-centric collections
• Warning bars, action clusters, task-specific
  contact lists

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MS Exchange Specs Features

• http//www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/featu
  res/

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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?