MailNews Talk:Future of Mail: Difference between revisions

MailNews Talk:Future of Mail (view source)

Revision as of 08:43, 2 August 2007

4,170 bytes added , 2 August 2007

added my thoughts on what a next-gen conversations app would look like

MykMelez

canmove, Confirmed users

2,056

edits

@@ Line 202: / Line 202: @@
 Note to others: there already is an app that integrates mail with the browser: Seamonkey (the continuation of the old Mozilla Suite).  The frontend (GUI) code is different from FF and TB, but the backend code is the same.
+== Thoughts On a Next-Gen Conversations App ==
+I notice that a lot of folks have been offering suggestions for improving Thunderbird, which is great, but I think it's also worth the mental exercise of setting aside that app for a moment and considering how people currently have online conversations, what problems they encounter, and what kind of app might be able to resolve those problems and provide those users with a better experience than they get from existing applications.
+Here are a few thoughts to start the conversation.
+First, some notes about the ways people have online conversations these days:
+* The majority of email users are on webmail, partly because it's free, but mostly because it eliminates the complexity of managing a client on each computer they use, which is particularly useful for folks who sometimes switch computers or work on temporary ones, like students and Internet cafe users.
+* Conversations happen in many places besides email and mailing lists, including the venerable Usenet newsgroups but also web-based discussion forums, instant chat, blogs, social networking sites, and SMS.
+* Devices are proliferating, and more folks are having conversations on non-computer devices like smartphones.
+Some problems with these trends include:
+* Webmail still isn't as usable as desktop clients, partly because of the immaturity of AJAX GUI toolkits and partly because of the platform's limitations (f.e. the box model).  The popular desktop GUI toolkits (including XUL) have been under development for many years, while AJAX toolkits are still fairly fresh off the block.
+* Conversations are scattered in many different places, and email clients only track a few of them, which makes it hard to keep track of all conversations.
+* Webmail generally ties applications, email addresses, and mail service providers together, making it harder for users to change one of those things.
+If I were to build an app that gave users a better experience, I'd want it to have these features:
+* web-based, so you can use it from any device with an internet connection;
+* local, so it integrates with your desktop, is faster than webmail when you're using it at home, and lets you work offline;
+* mechanisms for retrieving and presenting conversations from many different sources, including traditional mail/news protocols, feeds, instant messages, and web-based discussion forums;
+* state of the art indexing and searching capabilities to making finding a conversation simple, quick, and powerful.
+And I can imagine many other features that would elevate the experience from the usable to the sublime, including:
+* templates and special composition interfaces for easy creation of rich content messages like invitations and greeting cards;
+* interface elements like tabs for interacting with multiple messages;
+* session restore, so you can start up the app with the same messages (including ones you're in the process of composing) you were working with the last time you shut it down;
+* auto-tracking and merging of duplicate messages;
+* easy, integrated UI for unsubscribing/resubscribing to mailing lists;
+* social network-based junk mail filtering;
+* integration with popular web-based and desktop clients for address books, calendaring, and other related activities.
+Some contributions Mozilla technologies could make to such an app:
+* a rich cross-platform desktop GUI toolkit that can also be used to build web-based applications;
+* a platform that includes excellent HTML rendering, good HTML editing, and support for a relational database (SQLite) with fulltext search;
+* work underway (webrunner, domstorage) to improve the desktop-integration and local-storage capabilities of web-based apps;
+* code for retrieving messages from several kinds of sources (IMAP, POP, feeds), although it's unclear how reusable some of the code is, especially in a web-based app.
+Some issues that come up as I'm thinking about this:
+* How do users get mail service and an email address when using a independent webmail app?
+* What's the story for non-computer devices like smartphones?
+- [[User:MykMelez|MykMelez]] 01:43, 2 August 2007 (PDT)