Possible Message Composition Features

This area is for listing all possible things that you might want to do when creating a new message. The OSAF team will eventually prioritize this list to decide which features should go in which release (if any).

Addressing

(Note: many of the features discussed in this section clearly are strongly linked to the Contacts features.)

• To, CC, BCC addressing
• Switch personas on-the-fly
• Auto-completion of email addresses from email addresses and/or nicknames in address book and from prior recipients of your messages
• Allow different nicknames for different email addresses for the same person (e.g. jimhome and jimwork)
• Group nicknames (aliases), so you can send to a group of people with one nickname
• ((This should go in the Contacts section)) Inclusion of group nicknames in other group nicknames. You might want have one group nickname "myFamily", another "inLaws", and another "family". It is handy to be able to say that the "family" nickname consists of the "myFamily" and "inLaws" nicknames, and for the "everyoneIKnow" nickname to contain "family" (and a bunch of other random nicknames). Need not be hierarchical, but must be a DAG.
• Ability to send a message to the results of a search query, thus letting you, e.g., send a message to { everyone in the Category "classmate" with a birthday in June }
• Addresses can be chosen from address book with recipient's preferred email chosen by default but changeable
• Addresses displayed as specified by contact info
• Send group email individually for BCC-like behavior (but with each individual getting a message with their address in the TO line)

Editing

• Support for plain text, HTML, and maybe even RTF (Rich Text Format, a common document interchange format)
• Switch between HTML, RTF, or plain-text on the fly
• Formatting actions allow standard "HTML-ish" formats including bold, italic, underline, etc.
• Formatting actions allow user to add/subtract a level of quoting
• Formatting actions allow rewrapping lines (including quoted lines) well
• Support for stored style sheets (what Outlook calls "stationery", the presentation elements of a message)
• Customizable templates ("mail-merge" type features, the content of a message)
• Customizable forms
• Multiple signatures selectable on-the-fly
• Signatures editable inline without changing the original
• Multiple languages can be displayed in the same view
• Spell-checking
  • inline (e.g. underlining misspelled words)
  • batch
  • in multiple selected languages
  • with an easy mouse sequence/keybinding for correcting
  • with an easy mouse sequence/keybinding for adding a word to the dictionary
  • that doesn't check URLs or email addresses, even when put in angle brackets
• Grammar-checking
• Support for external editors
• Support for emacs and vi key bindings
• Auto-suggestion of word completion (type-ahead)
• Periodically auto-save draft

Attachments

• Allow sending standard attachments (S/MIME)
• Allow sending Chandler "Items" and views as attachments
• Sending attachments to only a subset of message recipients
• Allow sending attachments compressed
• Checkbox near header for "remember to attach document"

Other

• Smart tags e.g. date recognition, address of person
• Auto-categorize unsent messages as Drafts
• Periodically auto-save message
• Per-recipient "wrong format" warning (as specified in contacts)
• Auto & manual entry of message keywords
• Option to compress/combine (e.g. ZIP up) attachments -- might need info on receiver's uncombine capabilities (zip, gz, StuffIt^?)
• Deliver/read receipts requested
• Don't send message before a certain date/time
• Don't send message until task complete
• Can have more than one SMTP server per persona and select whichever is available (for people who move between multiple locations and SMTP servers)
• Send message via SMS transport/fax gateways
• Support for deffering sending until specified time/date
• be sure not to wrap URLs

External resources

Web pages:

• EmailStripper cleans up replies/forwards

Mailing list messages:

• Multiple email addresses with multiple reply tos by Tamir Halperin (auto-changing personas)
• AndersSchneiderman^? has some scenarios for sending messages to contacts found by a database query
• CharlieJoynt^? requests stripping various krufties from replies/forwards/poorly wrapped messages
• DonSmith requests ability to send attachments compressed
• Hotto hopes that the spellchecker will deal with context-specific words and symbols

Contributors

• AlCho
• DuckySherwood
• ChaoLam - 10 Jan 2003