The Compelling Vision for Canoga's Email Parcel

With Canoga, users will be able to manage large volumes of email more efficiently and effectively than with current email clients. Canoga will help people

• view and manipulate data of any data type (e.g. Calendar and Contact) grouped by project
• focus on email messages that are most relevant and important to the task at hand
• read through messages faster

Canoga will do this by

• integrating email tightly with other data types
• providing rich filtering and display capabilities
• eliminating spam

Tight integration with other data types

Canoga will integrate email tightly with other data types, in both display and in function.

• Users will be able to easily add arbitrary attributes to information items then search all items based on any attribute (inherent or user-defined). For example, a user could tag particular messages with the attribute "Cobra Project", then view all of the information with the attribute "Cobra Project" -- calendar items, messages, contacts, etc -- in a "virtual folder".
• It will be easy to augment email messages so they have the properties of additional data types. For example, it will be easy to convert a message with a request into an explicit Task, complete with Due Date and Actual Completion Date fields.
• Canoga's powerful text analyzer will recognize elements in email messages and connect them appropriately to other data elements. While a significant amount of interaction design and user testing need to be done to determine how to best make use of this feature, some potential uses include:
  • If a date and time appear in the body of an email message, selecting that field could create a Calendar entry for that date and time. (That Calendar entry could then be back-linked to the email message.)
  • If a phone number appears in the body of a message, selecting that field could bring up a dialog box for adding that phone number to the sender's Contact record.
  • If the phrases "Please", "I would like you to" or other such "request language" appears in the message, the message could be augmented with Task attributes. If the message contains a phrase "by next Tuesday", the due date could be set to next Tuesday by default.

Rich interconnectedness of various data types in both function and view is a key component of Chandler, and will be discussed in detail elsewhere. (@@@ TBD: link to "Soul of Agenda" document when it's finished)

Rich filtering and display capabilities

Current email programs do not make it easy for users to see messages of immediate importance separated from messages that are not germane. People are able to easily sort their inbox by various fields like the date or the sender's name, but those fields usually bear little resemblance to the priority order.

Some power users use filters to move messages into separate folders based on message attributes. For those skilled at creating filters, this can group messages nicely. Unfortunately, filters are difficult for most people to create. Furthermore, most people have a difficult time keeping track of their "to-do" messages -- ones they need to read, reply to, or act upon -- when they are spread across multiple folders.

Example View

Canoga will make it much easier to view messages grouped by relevance in the inbox.

• One morning, Professor Mabel Garcia looks at her inbox. In the current View of her inbox, she sees unread messages listed in this order:
  • Messages from her spouse
  • messages from her colleagues in the History Department
  • messages from her colleagues in the Communications Department
  • messages from students in her History of Writing Systems class
  • messages from students in her History of Communications Technologies class
  • messages from other people at the University of East-Central Illinois at Hoopston
  • messages on her "orality and literacy" mailing list
  • messages from her friends
  • messages from her family
  • messages from other people she has corresponded with
  • messages on her parachuting enthusiasts' mailing list
  • messages from strangers
• Each group has an expand/collapse button to allow her to hide messages that don't interest her at the moment.

Canoga will have several features which will make it extremely easy to view messages in this manner.

Filters and Views

First, Canoga will support powerful filters that users can easily import and export on a filter-by-filter basis. Thus, if one person comes up with a handy, worthwhile filter they can make that filter available to many other people.

Second, Canoga will have very powerful, customizable Views that are very easy to import and export. Again, easy sharing greatly leverages the efforts of a single person.

The combination of easily sharable filters and easily sharable Views is potent. Filters can change attributes of a message that Views can then display differently. For example, if you import:

• a filter which changes a message's Category to the Category you gave the sender's Contact record
• a filter which assigns a particular Category to messages from inside your domain
• a filter which assigns a particular Category to a particular mailing list
• a filter that assigns a particular Category to people you've corresponded with in the past
• a View that groups messages by Category

then you will have exactly the type of View that Dr. Garcia has in the example above.

Note also that because Canoga will implement all folders as "virtual folders" -- results of stored queries -- a message can be visible in more than one folder at a time. Thus, regardless of what task you are trying to accomplish, you can always view the relevant set -- and only the relevant set -- of messages in one folder.

Color-coding

The powerful Views can also help users recognize which messages in a group are most important. Not only can Views have particular sort orders for fields like Date or Importance, they can color-code by those fields or by how the receiver was addressed. For example, Dr. Garcia could color-code (or import a View that color-codes) as follows:

• red - messages that are TO her and only her
• blue - messages that are TO her and other people
• green - messages that are CC her only
• black - messages that are CC her and other people
• grey - messages that are BCC her.

No other consumer-grade email client has such powerful organizational features. While Microsoft Outlook's Views can do similar grouping and color-coding, there is absolutely no way to share Views. While Microsoft Outlook's users can import and export filters, the filters are not as powerful and can be imported or exported on an all-or-nothing basis.

"Done" button

Third, Canoga will have a "Done" button that people can press to mark the selected message(s) when they no longer have to read, respond to, or act upon a message, but don't want to delete it. Views can then be adjusted to show only messages that are not "Done" yet, helping the user to focus on "to-do" messages. When a message is marked "Done" and disappears from that View, the next message will automatically be selected.

While some email clients allow the user to set a flag, which in theory a user could use in this manner, in practice, flags do not work well for this purpose.

• Messages usually arrive with the flag un-set, so either the user has to declare that:
  • an unset flag means "to-do" and a set flag means "done", or
  • set the flag manually for each message that has been read but is not done
  • write a filter to flag each message as it arrives
• Messages occasionally arrive with the flag set by the sender. If the user has defined that a set flag means "done", then these messages will automatically be marked "done".
• It is sometimes a fair amount of work to flag a message and move to the next one. On Microsoft Outlook, for example, it takes at least four mouse actions to flag a message and select the next message.
• No consumer-grade email client is able to hide Unflagged Read messages without also also hiding all Unread or all Flagged messages.

Threading

Fourth, Canoga will have powerful threading and summarizing. Views will be able to show messages in threads and to hide threads that have no unread messages.

In addition, we plan to allow a View that displays contextually-related paragraphs from a message thread in an outline view, with extraneous quoting and signatures stripped out. This will make the messages read much more like the transcript of a conversation. This reduces the cognitive load enormously and allows users to read through messages much faster.

Eliminate spam

To focus on important messages, users need to not see unwanted messages. While there is no "silver bullet" to eliminate spam, there are lots of "lead pellets" that in combination can eliminate spam very effectively. Canoga will build in anti-spam mechanisms which include:

• automatic whitelisting for anyone the user sends email to
• easy blacklisting
• built-in challenge-response

While sophisticated users can develop their own spam filters, Canoga will also have hooks for various third-party packages, such as:

• state-of-the-art content analyzers (e.g. SpamAssassin and spambayes)
• collaborative filtering services (e.g. SpamNet)
• proof-of-work tokens (e.g. CamRam)
• per-correspondent addresses (e.g. TMDA's tagged addresses)

Anti-spam techniques are developing rapidly. OSAF will eagerly incorporate new techniques as they are proved effective.

-- DuckySherwood - 02 Apr 2003

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-- PieterHartsook - 25 May 2004