Think Outside the
Mailbox The Net
EffectBy Simson
GarfinkelDecember
2002/January 2003
Torrents of e-mail have turned us all
into file clerks. Isn't there a better way?
Way back in 1978 I got my first account on an
online bulletin-board system. Using my 300-bits-per-second modem, I
would log into a computer somewhere in Allentown, PA, and read and
reply to messages people had left for me. If there were messages I
thought were particularly important, I would save copies on my home
computer in a file I called “oldmail.”
Nearly 25 years later, the
fundamental e-mail paradigm hasn’t changed much. Sure, networks and
computers are a thousand times faster, and e-mail is now used not
just by a few geeks like me but by hundreds of millions of people
around the world. But those are only issues of scale. Deep down,
e-mail is the same as when I started using it during the Carter
administration. A message comes into my mailbox. I read it, and I
either file it away or delete it. Although the computer helps, it’s
my job to be an efficient file clerk.
The problem is that most users don’t have the training to be file
clerks. Is it better to have one mailbox named “Professional” for
all of the professional correspondence, or is it better to maintain
a separate mailbox for each correspondent? Is it best to create new
mailboxes every year, every decade, or never? I don’t know the most
efficient way to set up mailboxes so that messages I receive today
can be quickly found five years from now. Do you?
None of this matters terribly much if you get five or 10 messages
a day. But for those of us who get 100 or more, the sheer mechanics
of being a file clerk can consume a significant amount of
time—nearly an hour a day, in my case. And we are getting more
e-mail messages all the time. That’s because e-mail is more than
just person-to-person communication: it is the best way to
coordinate a group of people working on the same project.
To be fair, the last quarter century has brought one helpful
development in e-mail technology: filters, or rules that
automatically route messages to the appropriate mailboxes. Filters
can be triggered by the From, To, and Cc lines of the e-mail header;
a keyword in the Subject line; and even text in the message body
itself. Although filters do a good job of splitting one inbox into
many, the difficulty of setting up these rules deters most people
from using them. Even worse, filters are fundamentally the wrong
solution.
The real problem with e-mail today is in the mailbox and folder
metaphors. Sure, they feel like apt models. Paper letters are
delivered to physical mailboxes. We throw out the ones we don’t
like, and we file those we want to keep in folders or shoe boxes.
But e-mail is different. A physical letter can be in only one place
at a time. Why should we enshrine that limitation in our
computerized systems?
I’d like to see e-mail systems equipped with just
two buttons: Keep and Delete. Pressing either button would move a
message out of the inbox. Press Keep and it would be filed in an
intelligent database that would automatically characterize all the
many different ways you might want to index it. Mailboxes would
become keywords. If you wanted to see all the messages sent by
coworkers about the Agamemnon project, say, all you’d need to do
would be to ask for them—the database would automatically figure out
who your coworkers were and which messages related to the project.
Software would make such determinations on the basis of mailing
patterns, subject lines, and word analysis. The Delete button would
not immediately trash the message. Rather, it would file it away in
the same database and schedule the message for erasure after perhaps
one week. This would make it possible for you to change your mind
and recover a message you had deleted. How many times have you
wished you had that power? Researchers are actively exploring some
of these ideas.
Earlier this year at the TR100 conference at MIT, Richard F.
Rashid, senior vice president for research at Microsoft,
demonstrated the Personal Map being developed in Microsoft’s labs.
Analyzing Rashid’s stored e-mail, the Personal Map automatically
identified the various projects in which he was involved and grouped
his e-mail accordingly. The system even identified the e-mail Rashid
had exchanged with his contractor regarding renovations to Rashid’s
house.
Anyone who wants this sort of technology today, though, would
need to turn to the world of open-source software— specifically the
Evolution e-mail program being developed by Ximian, a startup in
Boston. Evolution automatically indexes all the e-mail it receives,
making blindingly fast searches possible. It then lets the user
organize messages into virtual folders, or “vFolders,” which
automatically update themselves every time a new message arrives.
For example, you could have one vFolder with all the mail from your
mother and another with every message containing the word
“aardvark.” If your mother sent you a message about her recent trip
to southern Africa, that message might show up in both places. It’s
a good first step, but picking the right searches for these vFolders
still needs too much thinking: the computer should do it
automatically.
The dramatic success of Google, the popular Web search engine,
has demonstrated that the key to solving information overload is a
clean interface combined with killer search capabilities. It’s time
for the world of e-mail to catch up.
Simson Garfinkel writes on
information technology and its impact. He is the author of Database
Nation (O'Reilly, 2000).