| Capability |
Detailed Description |
Comment |
MS Outlook (standalone, Exchange) |
Lotus Notes |
Google (GMail, Wave) |
Others |
| Scheduled delivery |
Allow users to pick their mail arrival schedules (hourly, morning/noon/evening, etc) to bundle delivery of mail. Simulates the cycle of the postman delivering mail, leaving your brain free outside those times to concentrate. A whitelist would allow instant delivery of whitelisted senders or subjects. Also enables a “rescind message” feature. |
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Standalone Outlook can be set to receive email on intervals, not at specific times via the Send/Receive Groups dialog. This is under Tools -> Send/Receive -> Send Receive Groups. Or under Tools -> Options -> Mail Setup -> Send/Recieve.
When directly connected to the Exchange server, email comes in automatically. A solution would be to set Outlook to Offline and then use the Send/Receive groups option to only check at certain times.
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Most POP-based email has a setting for "get email every X minutes." |
| Maintain whitelists to bypass blocks and delays |
“Add/remove to/from VIP list” option placed contextually in UI. VIP list is a whitelist to bypass blocks put on toasts or scheduled delivery. |
Some applications allow filtering to folders, but nothing quite this sophisticated. |
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| “Move to discussion” greys out “reply” |
Stops use of e-mail for threaded discussions. Adds “switch to discussion space” button. When selected, “reply” button grays out for everyone on all e-mails on this thread. Clicking sends user to discussion space where people can subscribe or unsubscribe, interface tracks branches better than e-mail, and discussion becomes persistent. |
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Google Wave promises a conceptual change here to enable larger discussion, even if it started as a message between two people. |
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| Automated routing and prioritizing? Not yet |
While this is an area ripe with speculation and fancy attempts at auto-categorization, Craig Roth recommends keeping current features for creating e-mail disposition rules. Continue research experiments on e-mail heuristics and allow manual creation for power users. But avoid black box or grey box (one can see what it’s doing and why, but it’s not easy) e-mail handling for now. |
Essentially an advanced rules engine? An interface to Xobni could help make connection to priority and frequency-of-connection. And Microsoft Research was doing something along these lines for the individual Outlook box. |
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Bayesian filtering (usually used in SPAM filtering) of mail might provide assistance here. |
| Un-bury turning off or freezing of “toasts” (alerts) |
Make “do not disturb” mode easy by making the option contextual (e.g., right click on a toast/alert) instead of buried in admin menus. Can turn off entirely or freeze for 1 hour. |
From an attention management perspective, shouldn't alerts be turned off altogether? |
Outlook 2003 and beyond let your turn off the pop-up alerts. They are called the "New Mail Desktop Alert." The option is totally buried: Tools -> Options -> Prefences -> E-Mail Options -> Advanced E-Mail Options. This is strictly on/off. No option for temporarily disabling the alerts, other than |
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| Enable e-mail hyperlinking |
E-mails can hyperlink to external sources, generally not to other emails. This results in copy/paste, attaching them as files, or parallel forwarding. Give e-mails GUIDs and allow links to enable security access to view an e-mail. |
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One assumes Google Wave will allow this, based on the demo and the press information. |
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| Enable role-based profiles |
An e-mail profile consists of UI layout (visible panes, tags/flags list columns, etc.) and policy (toasts, alerts, presence handling rules, etc.). Profiles for executives, administrative assistants, occasional users permit simple optimization of e-mail usage. |
This clearly applies in the Enterprise, rather than the solo user. Would it be valuable to have this capability to switch contexts easily? |
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| Enable sender tagged e-mails |
In addition to reveivers being able to tag e-mails senders should be able to attach tags (from fixed taxonomy or folksonomy with hinting) to messages. This greatly aids automated handling as well as categorization by receiver. |
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Categories are available throughout the Outlook interface, though Outlook 2007 hides them. Outlook 2007 email categories can be assigned to email under the message's options via the Ribbon Bar. They are an additional dialog from the priority and flagging tags. Categories can be assigned to incoming messages manually (directly from the ribbon bar) or via rules.
Unfortunately, Outlook or Exchange may automatically strip categories on outgoing messages (no option). There is a default rule that strips categories from incoming messages by default (turned off from Tools -> Rules and Alerts).
All categories in Outlook are local to the user and can be expanded infinitely.
See more on this from Slipstick on Microsoft Outlook Categories.
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Most apps allow for a High / Low priority tag that gets transmitted with the email. The receiving application would then need to understand what to do with it. |
| Stop attachment abuse |
Make it easy to "attach" a document but have that go to a central repository and the email application sends the link, rather than the document. |
Only potential drawback is for people who are offline or reading email from smartphone that isn't connected to the corporate network, if that is where documents get stored. |
Need to verify: Outlook talks to SharePoint in this way?
There have been applications integrated into Outlook that combine email with document management systems (2004 report from Jack Vinson on a webinar.)
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Google Wave makes this a core part of the story. |
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| Presence-enable recipient lists |
Presence should be indicated by each recipient when creating an email. Presence should be syndicated from IM and include calendar lookups (only as allowed within privacy policies). |
Clarify: Assume the value here is in knowing whether people will be participating in the conversation. |
The only "presence" in Outlook Exchange is in checking calendars when making appointments. |
Notes allows for checking calendars when making appointments. Sametime might do this to some extent. But is it integrated with Notes? |
Google Wave takes this a step further and strips differences between eMail and IM. If you are online, it's IM. If not, it looks more like eMail. |
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| Enable group-based rules |
For example, while travelling in NY, senders may get out of office by default but people in “NY sales and customers” group don’t get out of office message. |
Rules need to be aware of the context of the user AND of the sender (potential customer, FYI from boss, Firestorm from boss, etc). Most rule systems are fairly static - you have to know person and topic in advance. |
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| Turn e-mail into generic small-content tool |
E-mail becomes flexible, adaptive small-content editor. Rather than placing the burden on other channels to accept e-mails, the e-mail app itself becomes channel-aware by adjusting editing controls and metadata requirements. “To” field can be blog, instant message, SMS as easily as e-mail address. |
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Google Wave goes some way down this path. But not completely. |
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| Manage multiple inboxes |
Better acceptance of roles, from personal and business inboxes to multiple business “hats” such as system administrator, team manager. Easy routing between inboxes and simple views across them. Handling of federated inboxes where the work system is a mail handler, but not the primary one, for a personal account. |
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Outlook allows for multiple POP mailboxes, though corporate rules often disable POP on Exchange.
Personal-use of Outlook enables as many email accounts as one wishes to have. They can all come into one Inbox or there could be multiple Inboxes.
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| Provide inbox analytics |
Feedback on e-mails sent and received by time, user, and other patterns help understand and alter behaviors and improve efficiency (e.g, Xobni). |
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Xobni for Outlook. |
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| Token systems |
Token systems (like Seriosity) increase awareness of behavior using economic principles. Give people 20 tokens per day. Checking e-mail costs 1 token (maybe 2 during peak periods to even out load). While not a long-term solution, token systems, applied for limited periods , can have a long-lasting impact on behavior. |
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| Remind sender if no reply |
Avoid “dropping the ball” with e-mails by adding a simple checkbox indicating if an e-mail being sent should alert the sender if no reply is received within a given time (like 3 days). Too often post mortems indicate that a message was never replied to, the sender forgot about it (“fire and forget”), and the task was therefore left in limbo. |
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Outlook has a Follow-up flag for the sender of the email. It creates a due date associated with the message for follow-up. This appears as a task on the users' task list. |
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