[Klug-general] Talk at the next meet

[Karl Lattimer]

> > Either way, email sucks balls though... Some day soon we'll finally have
> > the infrastructure in place to replace the email metaphor with something
> > that actually makes sense... *sigh* to think xerox already solved this
> > problem...
> 
> What is so broken with email? What would you replace it with? 

This is a pretty abstract problem. It's actually more about the content
then the protocols. 

For instance, if someone sends me a meeting request via email, why do I
choose to accept or reject it via my message viewer, why doesn't it
appear in the context of my calendar? 

In the old days of offices (before computers) an inbox tray was
something that items in the following contexts would be placed;

 * Things I've been asked to do
 * Things I'm doing
 * Things I'm about to do

Now if we use this metaphor correctly in terms of email, we suddenly
realise that email is absolute junk... All of it...

So, think about how we organise mailing lists, building filters and
folders to store all of those messages in relevant contexts, however its
still not the correct way. Then take a look at how usenet/news groups
work, Its kinda the same, but it works better in that context. Of
course, news groups are categorised correctly anyway by their very
nature. 

Then of course, there's notifications, with things like facebook,
notifications are becoming a large part of email traffic. However,
notifications exist in a different context to letters, things I'm doing,
things I'm about to do etc...

So its pretty plain to see its all full of junk, and it needs some
language processing, semantic linking and contextual separation at the
natural points of separation rather than artificial ones. Moreover it's
got to do all this without a user lifting a finger.

Gmail/google calendar is pretty close to the eventual outcome, but it's
still not there yet :/ And of course we want to leverage the power of
"organise framework" to tie in snippets of data that arrive via email
into the filesystem, linking together relevant data and automatically
tracking the revisions of files that bounce about via email.

There's a lot we can do to improve the situation, right now a huge dump
of messages is not an effective way of organising things.

There are also problems with point to point encryption too, rather than
person to person... TLS for transmission should be standard by now but
it's not universally supported. There are also a myriad of protocol
inefficiencies such as imap having to download a whole message to
forward it on, in this world of mobile devices forwarding on a 300Mb
email via a phone is not plausible. pvanhoof is currently harping on
about the protocol stuff, you never know IMAPv5 might end up being his
baby.

BR,
 K