One disturbing thing about their presentation is that making it be usable requires the software to throw away a lot of message content: they seem to be assuming that for this to look good, it'd have to recognise and strip out redundant quoted text in the messages. That's somewhat scary.
What's so scary about it? Sure, quoting was useful back when everything was text. However, in today's world, it seems to me that if the software is capable of contextualizing replies for you, it's just redundant and error-prone.
It's scary because having my mail reader decide which parts of the message to delete before showing it to me sounds error-prone. I can imagine any number of ways that could fuck up with bad, if comical, results.
Sure, but if everyone was using this software, it wouldn't have to delete anything anyway. You can't write a new mail reader without accepting that your users will want to communicate with people who aren't using it.
(Well, you can, I guess, but it won't work...)
That's another reason that this kind of design would be more effective to deploy in a web forum first: captive audience.
Yeah, I think it's a cool idea, if not immediately practical as presented.
I see it as being more interesting as "what something like LiveJournal could do" than as "what an email client could do." (Listening, brad?) The first problem is message length - it looks like it'll work best for short messages. Some conversations have individual messages that run for several pages worth of text, which would be much clunkier under that system, or at least it seems like it'd be.
That's already the case with things like LJ, so we know what that looks like... It's a little awkward, but not unbearable. Also, most emails are short, right? rather than the (increasingly standard) reply up top and quote at the bottom.
> > > > Because it messes up the order in which people > > > > normally read text. > > > Why is top-posting such a bad thing? > > Yes. > Is top-posting bad? what happens when you have someone quoting multiple people along the chain in a single email?
True, but "normal" threading systems also don't have any sensible facility for dealing with
( ... )
Oh, trust me, I'm well aware of all of the problems with top-posting. I've given up on trying to convert people, though, too much of the business world have become top-posters by default and when I've tried internal replies, half the time they've been confused and missed some of the replies. I use internal quoting when replying to "real people" who can actually follow it and use top-posting in business correspondence and everyone is more or less happy.
True, but "normal" threading systems also don't have any sensible facility for dealing with that. The References header is an ordered list of ancestors, one parent.
Just because old systems don't handle them well doesn't mean new ones shouldn't attempt to. :) Also, older systems don't try to auto-prune and condense messages; quoting multiple people would absolutely wreak havoc with their system. If it didn't condense the messages like that, it'd be less of an issue.
Re: I prefer the condensed view.terryrayDecember 22 2003, 17:07:54 UTC
I wonder which kool-aid you mean: the email reader choice, or the fact that I created a LiveJournal account just so that I could reply here?
I got sucked into the MacOSX world about 18 months ago, because it was just too damned cool to have a Unix box that had good graphics and UI stuff on top of it. So, I finally abandoned the increasingly-creaky exmh mail reader and switched to Apple's Mail.app. It broke down under the load, and I had to switch to Microsoft Entourage for a while; fortunately, by the time I couldn't stand that any more, Mail.app had grown up a bit and I was able to switch back. I'm pretty happy with Mail.app now, except, of course, when I get all nostalgic and want to hack on my mail reader some more.
Google News works this wayfranklinmintDecember 22 2003, 23:30:03 UTC
and I've never been particularly happy with that, but it's much more sane than gmane, for example.
One difference is Google News doesn't display the full content this way, but let's you advance through a thread 10 posts at a time, and jump easily. Perhaps an email reader that showed multiple messages in the way that Google News does (10 in a row, hierarchy and date indicated in a separate pane) would be interesting.
Comments 35
What's so scary about it? Sure, quoting was useful back when everything was text. However, in today's world, it seems to me that if the software is capable of contextualizing replies for you, it's just redundant and error-prone.
Reply
Reply
Reply
(Well, you can, I guess, but it won't work...)
That's another reason that this kind of design would be more effective to deploy in a web forum first: captive audience.
Reply
Reply
I see it as being more interesting as "what something like LiveJournal could do" than as "what an email client could do." (Listening, brad?)
The first problem is message length - it looks like it'll work best for short messages. Some conversations have individual messages that run for several pages worth of text, which would be much clunkier under that system, or at least it seems like it'd be.
That's already the case with things like LJ, so we know what that looks like... It's a little awkward, but not unbearable. Also, most emails are short, right?
rather than the (increasingly standard) reply up top and quote at the bottom.
> > > > Because it messes up the order in which people
> > > > normally read text.
> > > Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
> > Yes.
> Is top-posting bad? what happens when you have someone quoting multiple people along the chain in a single email?
True, but "normal" threading systems also don't have any sensible facility for dealing with ( ... )
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Oh, trust me, I'm well aware of all of the problems with top-posting. I've given up on trying to convert people, though, too much of the business world have become top-posters by default and when I've tried internal replies, half the time they've been confused and missed some of the replies. I use internal quoting when replying to "real people" who can actually follow it and use top-posting in business correspondence and everyone is more or less happy.
True, but "normal" threading systems also don't have any sensible facility for dealing with that. The References header is an ordered list of ancestors, one parent.
Just because old systems don't handle them well doesn't mean new ones shouldn't attempt to. :) Also, older systems don't try to auto-prune and condense messages; quoting multiple people would absolutely wreak havoc with their system. If it didn't condense the messages like that, it'd be less of an issue.
Reply
Reply
( ... )
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What do you read mail with now?
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I got sucked into the MacOSX world about 18 months ago, because it was just too damned cool to have a Unix box that had good graphics and UI stuff on top of it. So, I finally abandoned the increasingly-creaky exmh mail reader and switched to Apple's Mail.app. It broke down under the load, and I had to switch to Microsoft Entourage for a while; fortunately, by the time I couldn't stand that any more, Mail.app had grown up a bit and I was able to switch back. I'm pretty happy with Mail.app now, except, of course, when I get all nostalgic and want to hack on my mail reader some more.
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Is threading in Mail.app done Right?
I'm still using 3.02 for mail, but I really want to believe that there's something better by now.
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One difference is Google News doesn't display the full content this way, but let's you advance through a thread 10 posts at a time, and jump easily. Perhaps an email reader that showed multiple messages in the way that Google News does (10 in a row, hierarchy and date indicated in a separate pane) would be interesting.
Reply
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