Hi Jeroen, thanks very much for the comment as my work seems a bit like sailing the unknown at the moment. The Cyrus IMAP "Conversations" are interesting mainly because an email thread search now spans folders. However, as far as I can tell, that development really refers to a THREAD (reply emails with a common parent email), not what I would call a CONVERSATION (emails between two people). Maybe it's too late to agree different meanings of these terms, but here's the proposal:
Contact-Centric Conversation Definition:
THREAD: given an EMAIL parent, a sequence of EMAIL replies traceable to that common parent. There's no reason afaik for this to be folder-specific except for limitations of server implentation. A thread ignores contact references entirely.
CONVERSATION: given a pair of CONTACTS (typically one is the current user of the email client), some sequence of EMAILS exchanged between those contacts. Again, there's no particular reason to limit this to a folder, and the minimum sensible implementation would search both the inbox and sent items folders.
Clearly the conversation view could be organised by thread if the user prefers.
Cyrus searching in multiple folders to pull out threads is a good thing though. It's not clear to me that those developers have considered the 'contact-centric' view at all though.
My work comes in a different direction: what if 'contact' was genuinely a first-class data object in the email client, (1) how would you select the contact? (2) how would the email client behave then?
(1) is straightforwardly by clicking on the contact name anywhere you see it.
(2) this is where 'conversation' (by my definition) appears - it's a fairly logical presentation of EMAILS with a CONTACT as the primary context. Alternatively the 'folder' presentation can be maintained with the emails presented by folder (e.g. 'Inbox = From, and Sent = To) - this uses existing standard functionality of the IMAP client by searching the folder based on email address.
The work I've done building a prototype with Roundcube suggests the contact-centric approach does have merit, not least as it co-exists quite well with the existing folder-view of emails, and also suggests it is materially different than the practical implementation of 'address book' that exists in all email clients I've seen.
I have an advantage at the moment in that afaik I'm the only user of a real contact-centric email client (although of course all email clients have address books) and accumulating comments from real experience in a blog:
http://collabtools.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/contact-centric-email.html
Thanks again for your comment re Cyrus - it's certainly useful to me.
cheers - Ian
On 2012-03-28 09:27, Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems) wrote:
On 2012-03-27 19:17, Ian Lewis wrote:
My experimental effort in extending Roundcube to provide a 'contact-centric' email experience is progressing ok, although I'm doing some fairly major engineering... The net of it is to arrive at the layout shown in the attached screenshot - the 'contact-centric' view is reached by clicking on a contact name anywhere it appears (otherwise Roundcube still behaves as usual, with folders of emails being displayed in the preview pane.) Contact names appear in the contacts list, in the mail list display 'From:' column, and in the From, To, CC fields of emails. Emails are opened by clicking on the 'Subject', as opposed to anywhere on the entire row.
Hi Ian,
Thank you for the interesting exercise you're going through - while you're making progress it becomes more and more interesting to me where you're going with this.
I do have a special interest because, among other reasons, Cyrus IMAP will most likely -in the foreseeable future- release a feature called "Conversations" - emails related to one another, across the traditional boundaries of a folder, which almost naturally, I suppose, is most instinctively navigated through Contacts, Categories, Contexts, Distribution Lists and whathaveyou.
This work is currently ongoing within FastMail(.fm), and though without an RFC (there's plans to submit a draft for a proper IMAP4rev1 extension RFC), but if you are interested, let me know.
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen