[Klug-general] The Problems with EMail (Re: Talk at the next meet)

[Karl Lattimer]

> 1. A Use case problem which really means, meaning that email is
> difficult to sort find and generally organise (What people have been
> discussing...

This is what I want to concentrate on. Email is only one part of it my
vision of the future desktop requires massive changes and computers
employing lots weird underlying tech to solve most of out data
management problems. Data management is only one part of it, and the
interaction is another major aspect.

One example of how we (free desktop developers) fail at user interaction
is in one of the user testing tasks.

1. Close the open document
2. Re-open the document you just closed

This seems like a pretty simple task right? Well it is, except that once
the user completes the first task, there's 50 files on the desktop all
similarly named...

Apple did this user test, and solved it. In 1981! They created an
animation between the desktop item, and the application closing.
Essentially the window border shrinks to the object. Cool huh! Simple
but solves an actual interaction problem. 

It's things like this that I'm learning in a few books I got while I was
in Boston at GNOME summit, the yearly pilgrimage to the MIT bookshop :)

> 2. It can't handle Binary very well so people send there Holiday Snaps
> over email and the inbox get clogged. It can't even handle formatting
> very well which is why people try to use HTML email etc

Yeah, why don't those files get pulled out of the email client, reducing
the amount of inbox usage and placed into a file system where the
language semantics of the email they were received in, and the meta data
of the file itself are used to put it in a sensible place!

Organise FW and wizbit have been planning this... :)

> 3.  It was never designed as a complete procedure but is a
> amalgamation of different things, hence its open to abuse and nothing
> is secure. SMTP, Pop3, IMAP, PGP, you name a protocol and its probably
> used in email somewhere.

Yeah, on the client side we have issues, but the server portion of email
is a rotten dead dog, exploited by spammers et al. 

> I had a fourth problem but I've now forgotten what it was.....

LOL... Never mind, I'm sure that it'll come to you the next time you
bump into it.

BR,
 K