Microsoft Looks At Integrating Forums and E-mail

prostoalex writes "Scott Hanselman shares a document from Microsoft Research internal Web site on Gina Venolia's latest research in user interface design. Since half of the e-mail conversations require reply and then further replies, the model is not too different from current Web forums. Future Outlook versions might integrate the nested interface for e-mail conversations." Gotta say, that'd be pretty nice to have.

If I understand this correctly...

[l-ascorbic]

...Apple Mail has done this since Panther came out. Emails can be viewed as threaded discussions. It's clever, and doesn't just go on subject line, but also pays attention to in-reply-to headers (or whatever it's really called).

Mozilla Has this

[nachoman]

Mozilla already has this. You can set your email to threaded view and it looks just like it does when viewing a newsgroup. Newsgroups are really email meets forums. Forums just seem to be gaining more ground today instead of newsgroups.

There is nothing new here. Move along people, nothing to see.

MacOS X Mail?

[Pirogoeth]

The latest version of MacOS X Mail [apple.com] attempts to do threading to keep back-and-forth discussions together.

Evolution already does this

[Anonymous Coward]

Ximian evolution has done this, at least since 1.4.5 and probably earlier. My e-mail has been a lot easier to manage using this format. It must have been real tricky for Microsoft to 'think up' this idea, when an actual product already has it in use. Oh wait, that's what they do... They'll probably patent it now.

Re:If I understand this correctly...

[PotPieMan]

Mutt [mutt.org] has done this for as long as I can remember.

Re:If I understand this correctly...

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, the latest Mac mail has a "fancy threads" feature: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/mail/ [apple.com]

Did they really needed a research for that?

[ch3]

This is at least 1 year since Mozilla Mail has this feature, Thunderbird has it also and so has The Bat and Mail.app (OSX)...

I would like to know how much Gina Venolia got paid to find something so much obvious...

Re:I can't believe I'm saying this, but...

[derF024]

Just use a Mac. Their email client pretty much does this already.

Or use mozilla, or evolution, or kmail, or squirrelmail, or mutt, or any of the other email clients that already do this and have gotten the concept right. Apple's mail.app doesn't actually show you a nested discussion, it just groups messages by threads.

Welcome to 1997 email concepts Microsoft, we were all wondering when you'd get there.

its nested view, not threaded view

[kervel]

i think they mean the same layout as ./ comments when you set view to 'nested' (not 'threaded')

Re:If I understand this correctly...

[SkArcher]

Operas inbuilt E-mail client, M2, also already does this, integrating it with the usenet reader as well.

Opera can be set to a variety of preferences for how it makes threads, depending on reply-to's, users recieve, subject lines and matched text in the mail body.

This is not a new idea, it is just new to MS users.

Re:Outlook already does this

[YU Nicks NE Way]

Not really. Outlook and other mail clients look at the mail header to define a conversation. This is intended to do a better job than that: it looks at the content of the mail as well and tries to infer the threading structure from that.

Good... or bad

[93 Escort Wagon]

This could be useful, but it would really depend on how well it's designed (which is a big red flag, given that we're talking about Microsoft). You'd certainly need some way to disable it.

I work at a university, and I've got a few professors who use their inbox as their address book. So whenever they write to me, the message invariably has the same subject line - usually from a project that ended one, two, or more years ago! They pick that one because that's the first message from me they find in their inbox. I would imagine in this circumstance every mail I've ever gotten from the particular individuals would be concatenated into one long discussion - even though very little or none of it would be cogent to the current message or messages.

Groupwise

[BaronM]

Groupwise has had this for a while now. I'm pretty sure Notes does too. And Mozilla. And Mutt.

IBM Remail project covers same ground...

[glawrie]

An earlier Slashdot article ( Remail: IBM is Reinventing Email [slashdot.org]) from December 9th 2003 discusses similar work done by IBM researcher's on an advanced email system. It too aims to put the 'user' at the heart of email processing, and has identified clever iconic images with dots and lines as a way to help navigate discussion threads. But IBM's project seems to be more expansive than the work reported here, covering more aspects of how we interact with email.

You can do this in Outlook 2000

[Montag2k]

I've set up my Outlook 2000 to do this. All you need to do is go to the Tools menu, mouse over Current View, and change the option to "By Conversation Topic". You can also add buttons to automatically "Expand all" or "Collapse all" conversations. Its very handy - as soon as a new e-mail comes in, the entire conversation moves to the top of your inbox and you can re-read the history.

Montag

Re:Why has this taken so long?

[RevDobbs]

Mozilla (I'm running 1.4) does have a "threaded" view for email folders; I find it very handy for mailing lists.

So for the previous poster that asked "why doesn't a major email client support this yet?", the Once Great Lizard already does. If by "major email client" you mean an Outlook [Express] derivitive, the ::plbbt:: to you.

No it's different

[pavon]

Come on guys. I know reading the article is too much to ask for but could you at least look at the pretty picture. Apple Mail, Mozilla, mutt, pine all have a feature that let you sort the message listing in a usenet-style nested format. This is very different from displaying the contents of the messages themselves in a nested slashdot-style format. AFAIK, these other programs do not have this feature.

Nested interface exists .. Bloomba!

[the_dreadnought]

I recently ditched MS Outlook XP for Bloomba: http://www.statalabs.com/ Nested email interface, much faster search speed, and SpamAssassin functionality.

Re:If I understand this correctly...

[SkArcher]

Opera is, overall, one of the finest pieces of desktop software available. In-built mouse gestures, total and obedient customisation, the life saving 'resume where you were before Windows crashed' feature, M2 for e-mail and news, a download agent and it does desktop memos for office use.

And thats to say nothing of the pure speed and power of the thing. Faster than any other web-browser than I have ever used.

This post crafted using Opera

Re: mutt

[gimpboy]

yeah, this is one of the things in mutt i really like. in case someone is wondering this is what it looks like:
screen shot [pitt.edu]
at least after i've configured things a bit.

Re:Why has this taken so long?

[JimDabell]

Usenet is a free-for-all public discussion. Email exchange is an invitation-only private discussion. Big difference.

Not really. It's trivial to set up a private NNTP server. Okay, you can't call private NNTP servers "Usenet", but it's the exact same software.

As I suspected...

[potcrackpot]

99.9% of the comments so far have been critical. I find this pathetic.

Would everyone please read and digest the article. This is NOT simply sorting by conversation topic, which a number of people are suggesting (Mozilla already does this, yadda, yadda yadda).

To the goon who suggested that outlook 2000 already does what the article is talking about - it doesn't! Sorting "by Conversation Topic" is basically just a threaded view, sorted by subject.

What the article is talking about is separating the conversations from the emails, and displaying them in a time ordered, colour-coded fashion. So, if an email thread splits into two separate conversations, this will be visible in the UI. Sorting by subject will not achieve this.

I'm not suggesting by the way, that this is a new idea; I'm simply explaining what the article is about to those of you (most of the posters) who can't be fucked to read the article.

I expect to be modded down for suggesting that people get a clue, and for suggesting that MS have had an idea which isn't bad.

Re:It a little bit more than threaded

[Todd Knarr]

Threaded sort is canonically sorted chronologically (as one part of the sort), and nested/layered in exactly the way the picture shows. The highlighting... isn't normally needed as all messages are grouped and nested so that subthreads are visually related already.

Groupwise...

[Parsa]

...has an option that lets you view the email as a discussion thread.

I don't use it though.

J

Re:No it's different

[CTho9305]

See page 6 [microsoft.com] of this pdf for what the article refers to... This [cmu.edu] is what Moz does.

enough...

[YE]

OK, now that everybody has said (three times, no less) "it seems they invented threaded view, duh", can you please go read the linked article? This is NOT threaded view, it's something more complicated (and seemingly useful).

Apple's Mail App does this

[ryanw]

Apple's mail client already can organize email by THREAD. It's very useful.

Emacs/GNUS did it 10 years ago

[Baki]

I have been reading mailing lists for 10 years using GNUS, the usenet client for emacs. GNUS has many other "backends", not only nntp/usenet. You can really read mailing lists as if they were newsgroups. You can configure your "post" to just send the message to the list server, and your usenet kill files (and score files) are applied to these "groups" just like elsewhere.

GNUS can even read your inbox and split your mails into different "groups"/lists based on criteria you configure, you don't need procmail for that.

And it has a slashdot backend, to convert slashdot into a newsgroup :) (but I'm not using it at the moment).

Re:Why has this taken so long?

[iabervon]

Email exchange is private, unless you're sending to a mailing list. Then it's limited to the people who are on the mailing list, unless it's a mailing list archived online. If it's archived online and can get mail from people who are not subscribed, then it's identical to usenet except for the underlying protocols.

In fact, Pine has provided the same interface to email and usenet for ages. Google actually provides a web forum interface to usenet.

The only real difference between email and usenet is what the protocol is designed for. There is a spectrum from one-to-one communications to general broadcast, and different protocols are better for different things. And, these days, HTML over HTTP is available for the whole range. The interesting thing is putting a common interface (Outlook in MS's case) over all of these communications, regardless of the native protocols involved.

Re:Amazing...WOW

[That's Unpossible!]

Hmm...my little simple text email client, "Mutt", has been doing the threading of my emails for years now.

If MS really wanted to impress me with an upgrade to Outlook, they'd take out the damned HTML mail capabilities. I've seen 3 line emails from people come at me, that were so overbloated with background images, fonts and other crap that is not only unnecessary, but, actually distracting from the message they tried to convey...

Looks like your "simple text email client" might want to incorporate some features found in Thunderbird (Mozilla Mail) ... I can view HTML messages as simple HTML or even plain text.

Re:If I understand this correctly...

[skinfitz]

...Apple Mail has done this since Panther came out.

...and Outlook 2003 has done this since before Panther came out.

On October 21st 2003 to be precise [techtarget.com], as opposed to Panther on October 24th 2003 [askbjoernhansen.com].

Incidentally has anyone noticed that Panther has Microsoft style crash error reporting back to Apple now?

RTFA

[greygent]

I read a bunch of drivel trying to make one of two utterly pointless points:

- Every email client under the Sun already does threading

RTFA, they're not talking about threading alone.

- The sarcastic "Oh look! Microsoft thinks it innovated again!"

I see no where where Microsoft states that this is some innovation. I do see where it says that this is a Microsoft Research usability study.

I also note that this paper was published by ACM, so I'm assuming they found it interesting enough.

Re:Amazing...WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Mutt plus links [mff.cuni.cz] equals the ideal text email client [mff.cuni.cz]?

Re:Amazing...WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

The new Outlook 2003 has this exact capability - a checkbox on one of the Options dialogs allows you to convert and read all email as plain text. If you want to view a particular email in it's original format, Outlook provides a quick link to do just that. Another nice feature is that it won't download the images unless you explicitly ask to see them.

Re:Mozilla Has this

[Burpmaster]

No, it can do this. You just have to set your "sent" folder to your inbox. Look in the Mail and Newsgroup account settings under "Copies and Folders" for your mail account.