[Design] view/filters: default option

[Kaitlin Duck Sherwood]

I propose that when Chandler installs, it comes with a configuration 
that presents information in a novel, useful format that I will 
describe here.  This probably shouldn't be the default configuration, 
but it should be easy to select.


I believe that people want to see their "to-do" items in their inbox, 
in priority-ordered groupings, as I discuss in
   http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2002-November/000680.html

I also believe that people won't configure things themselves, but 
will happily use someone else's customization, as I discuss in
   http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2002-November/000676.html

My readers and clients have found a configuration like this to be very useful:

+ New messages go into the inbox.

+ Messages are in groups.  Each group can be expanded/collapsed by 
clicking on a plus/minus symbol, right-pointing/down-pointing 
triangle, whatever.

+ At the top are groups of people in address books.  All messages 
from people who are in the X address book are in the X group.

+ Groups are displayed in the order of the address books, whatever 
that is.  (Alphabetic works for me.)

+ After the groups of people in address books are messages that are 
non-spam from strangers (unrecognized addresses).

+ After the strangers' messages are groups for each mailing list, one 
group per list.

+ After the mailing list groups comes stuff that is borderline spam 
-- messages that have a spam score that is lower than some threshold.

+ Messages with a spam score that is higher than the threshold are 
not visible (deleted, in a different folder, or hidden).

+ There are three (or four) buttons somewhere: "Dismiss", "Show next 
message", "Delete", and, if there is adaptive spam filtering, "This 
is spam."  ("Dismiss" is discussed in a different thread.)

This is essentially the strategy that I recommend in my books; those 
who have implemented this strategy report a 25%-75% time savings on 
email.  (Okay, okay, all but one, who had a relatively light email 
load.)

Note that the grouping here is by sender, not by project.  I've found 
that grouping by project is very hard to do.  (Even people don't know 
what to do with messages that mention two different projects.) 
However, there is always one and only sender of a message, and people 
*TEND* to be in different identifiable groups.

Yes, yes, I know that your friend Joe is in your "Work" group *and* 
your "Friends" group.  But doing *some* categorization is a lot 
better than doing none.  And, depending upon how Chandler does 
things, you could conceivably have Joe in two different address books 
so that his message shows up in two different groups.  (Dismissing 
one of Joe's messages should dismiss both.)



For extra bonus credit, it would be handy to have a special address 
book that is automatically populated with anybody that the user sends 
a message to.  (Dragging and dropping to their regular address book 
of course makes it easy to populate their regular address book(s).) 
Then you could have three groups of people automatically: "in my 
address book", "not in my address book but I have corresponded with 
them in the past", and "unknown senders".

I don't care how this is implemented.  One way would be by including 
a set of filters that tag all messages with a category.  To do this, 
however, you'd need two additional, flexible filter actions "assign 
to category of same name" and two new filter conditions "is in any 
address book" and "is a mailing list":
	if incoming message sender is in any address book
	then assign message to category of same name as address book
and
	if incoming message is a mailing list
	then assign message to category of same name as mailing list

If you are willing to expose Chandler's address book to an external 
executable, you could have the executable do all the magic:
	if true
	then execute script categorizeMessages.py

Both of these feel slightly kludgy to me.

It could also be a very specialized View, one that knows about 
address books.  I actually like this implementation best, because 
it's completely non-destructive and potentially easy to find.  Users 
can flip back and forth between this "magic" view and "show all 
messages" or "show all unread messages", whatever.

Doing this as a View also makes it easy for those of us who like to 
write filters to customize it just exactly the way we want it.

Obviously, Chandler won't die if this isn't implemented, but I 
*strongly* encourage you to consider providing this view or something 
like this.  As I said, the feedback I've gotten is that this buys you 
25-75% of email time savings.

For an academic paper on organizing an inbox by category, see
	Google-Lucky: "bifrost inbox organizer"   (the paper has a long URL)

-- 
Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
Author of the _Overcome Email Overload_ series, http://www.EmailOverload.com