Remail: IBM is Reinventing Email

mrbarkeeper writes "IBM Research has thought about email and came up with a prototype of a better mail client. From their website: 'The Collaborative User Experience (CUE) team in IBM Research has spent nearly a decade studying email. Not only has email become one of the most pervasive and successful collaborative tools available, it has also become a key component of IBM's Lotus Software offerings. In many ways, email can be seen as a victim of its own success - users increasingly suffer from overload and interruptions as well as use email in a manner for which it was not intended.' Several ideas worth discussing, some good, some irrelevant. But still worth a gander for anyone who spends most of their day in their inbox.

Similar to MIT's Haystack?

[delirium28]

Is it just me, or does this sound similar to Haystack [mit.edu]? Haystack was covered on Slashdot earlier [slashdot.org]

Re:key component of IBM's Lotus Software

[randyest]

Oh no you don't -- cc:Mail, its evil older brother is way worse.

But I R'd TFA and this client looks pretty cool in some respects. Sounds simple, but the list seperators [ibm.com] seem quite cool to me (and obvious in hindsight).

The visualizations [ibm.com] seem useful and new as well.

I'd try it out. When is a client including these features going to be released?

Re:Blowtus Goats

[pete-classic]

I've got to second AC here.

I have to use notes at work and it is the worst mail client I have ever used, by a comfortable margin.

Parts of the interface dissapear when the window is inactive. It can't remember that I want to start up in mail. It can't remember that I want a preview pane. Occasionally the preview pane gets confused and displays the body of a message adjacent to the message header that is selected. The buttons are non-standard. The UI medaphor is glaringly inconstant.

Oh, and it gives me a new mail message, but the new mail isn't listed until I manually refresh half the time.

This is with 5.0.8. Maybe some of these bugs are fixed in newer versions.

Anyway, I am skeptical about anything mail related (or UI related for that matter) that comes from the vendor of such a piece of poop.

-Peter

Re:key component of IBM's Lotus Software

[tollieman]

Obviously you have no idea what you are talking about, do you even use Lotus Notes? For the past 5 years, I have used many email clients, outlook, mozilla mail, mutt, evolution, kde, Notes seems to do just fine, archiving, replication, calendar tools, scheduling, reminders, runs circles around most other email colab packages

Re:Pressure to Respond Quickly

[sphealey]

I must admit that I disagree with the assertion that "Pressure to Respond Quickly" is some sort of negative issue with e-mail; in fact, I'd go so far as to say that with the volume of mail in inboxes today, people are actually not feeling enough pressure to respond quickly. Sure, sometimes we're okay with waiting for a response for a while, but oftentimes nowadays email is used in the role that voicemail used to play, and if one receives a voicemail, one tends to reply directly afterwards. Sometimes, the same attitude needs to be taken in regards to email.

I worked in engineering offices prior to the widespread use of voice mail and e-mail, and I have worked in them through both deployments. As far as I can see, engineers were more productive prior to the arrival of e-mail. Voice mail was a bit of a wash, with some positive and some negative effects.

sPh

Re:Sweet function

[xlyz]

try sylpheed-claws. you'll have nice threaded mails and much more

Re:Sweet function

[TheRaven64]

Mozilla mail can display email by thread, and the Apple Mail.app highlights other mails in a thread when you are reading a message in the default mode, or gives a thread-tree view if you select it as an option.

Re:Blowtus Goats

[Deacon Jones]

Parts of the interface dissapear when the window is inactive.

I've never seen that, and I've been developing with Notes since '99.

It can't remember that I want to start up in mail. It can't remember that I want a preview pane.

File>>Preferences>>User Preferences

Re:Blowtus Goats

[Deacon Jones]

oops, apologies, the I've never seen it came across as a denial. (hit submit to soon). I don't doubt your experience, but perhaps its been troubleshot already.

Try The R5 forums [lotus.com] which are usually better then any online help.

Re:key component of IBM's Lotus Software

[Alan Partridge]

Those "List Seperators" are just Apple "Labels". The only person who would think they are innovative is someone who's been under the thumb of Pine for the last 20 years.

Re:Al Gore invented the Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Well Gore is the one who made the idiotic claim, so who is the retard

You are the retard. Check your facts [snopes.com] before you post.

Moderators are on drugs.

[JonTurner]

>as in Lotus Notes
>as in the worst email client ever

"Score:2, Funny"? For shame, moderators -- that was "+5 Informative", if I've ever seen it.

So how bad is Lotus Notes, you ask? So bad that The User Interface Hall Of Shame dedicated an ENTIRE PAGE [libero.it] to detailing LN's faults. "This single application could have formed the basis for the entire site."

Yes, it's that bad.

Re:key component of IBM's Lotus Software

[Zocalo]

Seconded on the list seperators; I want this in my email client *yesterday*! Just *why* this idea this has escaped everyone's attention is unbelievable given that it is, in effect, simply an extension of the "thread" view of Usenet clients into the other headings. I'm not too sure about the visualisations though, although I dare say that people who like mind mapping software will orgasm over this.

Re:key component of IBM's Lotus Software

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a mail client, it's an applications platform. Of course it has its own proprietary APIs to choose from, but with the tiniest bit of research you'd learn that you can program into it yourself using your choice of C++ or Java through its fully-exposed data model. If you don't like the mail application, its source is wide open - tweak it or rebuild it to your liking.

As far as communications protocols, it only uses NRPC when talking to a Domino server. Otherwise it uses basic run-of-the-mill SMTP. In fact, quite a full implementation of the ESMTP extensions, but then that would sort of negate your point, so let's ignore it, shall we?

If all you want is mail, Notes isn't for you. Pure and simple. Go somewhere else for that, but don't damn it for being more than what you want.

Re:Sweet function

[Tim C]

You've never used a mail client that supports threading?!

The main thing that I bemoan having been effectively forced to switch to Outbreak at work is the lack of support for email threading. Previously, *every* client I have *ever* used for any amount of time has supported it, in the 9 or so years that I've had a mail account.

To my mind, not supporting threading simply disqualifies a program from being a serious mail client, no matter what other features it may support. (There are others, too, such as support for multiple accounts, and some sort of filtering mechanism)

Re:key component of IBM's Lotus Software

[dominux]

on the security front Notes is the oldest and most widely implemented public key infrastructure. Public keys are held in the name and address book, private keys in the ID file. The security infrastructure is pretty sound and is available to all applications to use. As for bloat and email, exchange and others started life as email servers and grew and evolved extra bells and whistles. Notes started out (that is Plato Notes in the 70's) as a general purpose system for shuffling documents about between databases. Give every user a database and shuffle documents that look like memos between them and you have built an email system. Email is a trivial application of what Notes really is. Alan.

What, never heard of attachments?

[87C751]

If you want to send some fancy, dolled-up, formatted, tabled and/or fonted document and you simply cannot express your thoughts without such accoutrements, attach the god damned thing!

I'm certainly not saying "a terminal window and pine should be the only allowable way to view email". What I am saying is that HTML has no business being the default format for email. The use of active content as a virus delivery vector alone is reason enough.

Re:Features I wish we had

[why-lurk]

<sarcasm>

Wow, do you think we could implement this with headers called Message-ID and In-Reply-To? And allow users to implement filters on the In-Reply-To or References headers?

Perhaps we could even create an RFC and give it the number 2822 [faqs.org].

And if someone would only write a document [dsv.su.se] describing how to correctly implement these headers in MUAs, we'd really be in business.

</sarcasm>

Really, it's a wonder that most mail clients make all of this so hard. Even Mozilla gets threading wrong, by refusing to allow them to be sorted by anything but Sent date, and always sorting them in your message list by the date of the *oldest* message in the thread, rather than the newest. It makes threads practically useless.

Despite my caustic comments above, it doesn't help that many popular client (like those by MS) don't properly implement In-Reply-To or References. As a result, most clients simply guess at threads by looking at Subjects.

Re:Blowtus Goats

[Deacon Jones]

Yeargh.
OK, here's some free tech support for you:

Yup, it forgets that you want to keep the preview pane up. The only solution I found to this on the web was to put some script [SNIP}

There's a VERY easy solution--Go to file>>database>>Properties. Then go to the "rocket ship" tab (sorry, but most people who have these troubles need pictures). Then choose "Restore as last viewed by user" under the "When opened in Notes client" option.

See, very simple. Should that have been automatically set? Perhaps.

some obscure scripting language.

Ahem. Lotusscript is EXACTLY the same syntactically as Visual Basic (prior to .Net). While it may not be favored here on slashdot, its not exactly obscure, unless you're not a programmer, but then every language would be obscure to you.

System reports that I have new mail, but selecting "open mail" doesn't reveal any messages

1. Make sure you're checking all your folders. One flaw is that Notes doesn't have an unread count next to the folder, prior to R6. 2. Make sure you're at least past 5.0.5, b/c this issue hasn't shown up for me since then.

The concept of a trash folder is missing;

Well, that's a personal aesthetics, issue, as well, if you have a programmer/developer worth his/her salt, its a very EASY scripting fix.

It sounds to me like your frustration stems from some misinformation, and a lack of a Notes Developer. The Notes mail template is very easily customized, so quite a few options seem to have been left in a manner you don't care for, but with customization could be fixed.

As for your looking forward to Exchange, well good luck to you, and hope it stays up for more than 24 hours. To borrow the bashing phrase being used all over this thread, I find Outlook to be crap.

Re:Lotus Notes

[khrustalicious]

Couple of things...F9 is typically a refresh on spreadsheet apps. Even M$ Excel uses it as refresh...I suspect this is because 1-2-3 also used it as refresh, and Lotus simply continued to use that.

Yes, the red screen of death is annoying, but it's a LOT less prevalent than it was. I program in Notes daily, and it's probably been six months since I've seen it. (Using 5x now...it happened much more in 4x).

I don't believe it lacks in programming functionality. Lotus Script is fairly rich; there is nothing I haven't been able to do with it regarding Notes apps. We use it to fill Excel and other progs for reporting, and a lot of other stuff. Also, you can use Java within any database if you prefer that to Script. As well as Javascript if you're webifying the app. Lots of options.

As I said, I know it's not perfect...but given the other options I've seen out there, it's hella better than a lot of stuff.

Keep in mind also that version 7 is en route, which will introduce some really interesting changes. Then there's the WebSphere potential...

Also, I get paid by the hour to work with it, so I AM a bit biased :)

Re:Blowtus Goats

[autiger]

Edit | Paste Special... Choose 'Text' Click OK. Notes is an OLE container so it lets you paste all kinds of things natively as embeds, like formated Word docs, Excel spreadsheet cells, and yes, HTML. I do normally use the method above when I'm pasting Web content however.

Lotus Notes is great for developers

[solprovider]

The Notes client has its issues, but so does every major program. The usual complaint is that it does not act like all other MS apps. I am surprised Slashdotters worry about that. Remember that Lotus Notes was released before MS released Windows3. It was MSWindows that changed all the key bindings from the standards used by Lotus and Wordstar. The only widespread program that did not use those keybindings was WordPerfect, and everybody required cheatsheets to use that it. MS pulled its usual "let's change everything so we can control it." Now it is considered bad that any software has survived from the pre-Windows era when dinosuars roamed.

I would guess that none of the "Notes sucks" comments come from programmers. I figured a discussion about mail clients would pull more from the techies than the comments from plain users that we are seeing. Lotus Notes mail is a programmer's dream. Every aspect of the application interface is built on open source, meaning you can read it and change it. The only closed source code is the code for the thin client, which handles security and encryption.

Development can be through interface settings and several languages: Formula, Java, JavaScript, and LotusScript. Most of the GUI can be programmed using JavaScript, for those who cannot learn advanced languages like the manager-targeted Formula Language.

Re:Lotus Notes is great for developers

[Stan4Notes]

The hardest part of programming for Notes/Domino is "getting it" -- the platform is quite unlike anything else. At the absolute beginner level, the best reference I've seen is Sam's "Teach Yourself Lotus Notes and Domino R5 Development in 24 Hours". It is really, really, basic -- but nothing more advanced will make any sense at all until you've got the basics covered.

Beyond that, the Lotus Developer Domain will give you a great place to get design/development advice:

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/46dom.nsf

The community is great, and obvious newbies are given a lot of slack if they stay on the polite side of needy.

For the most part, the Domino Designer Help database (installs with the Designer client, can be read with only the Notes client) will get you where you want to go -- if you know where you want to go. There are reasonably good books for further info, including freely downloadable IBM Redbooks, and titles in the Que (Special Edition Using), Sam's (Unleashed) and Wiley (Bible) catalogs.