[Design] From, To and most of all CC

[Mimi Yin]

Hi Joel,

I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment of the CC field. It has  
semantics that most email clients don't take advantage of. Helping  
users differentiate between signal and noise will be an important  
part of the visual design of the summary table.

I just wanted to clarify that I'm not proposing that we won't offer  
users the ability to change the From: and To: fields to be more  
specific (e.g. Organizer, Delegate, Host, Requestor, Suitor, etc).**  
The note this morning was regarding what the Addressing fields are  
called by default. Given that we won't have a good way in the short- 
term to tell if the user is putting something on their calendar  
because it's a meeting, a birthday or flight information, it will be  
hard for us to customize the From: and To: fields accurately.

**In reality, in the short-term, barring significant widget work,  
users will *not* be able to customize the From: and To: fields to be  
more specific.

Mimi :o)

On Apr 5, 2006, at 8:34 AM, Joel Finkle wrote:

> I've been a prairie dog on this list for a long time now (ever  
> since I got full-time employment again), just poking my head up  
> every once in a while, and only reading the occasional note, so I  
> hope that this isn't a repetition.
>
> Mimi Yin's note this morning about From and To, and their meanings,  
> sparked a couple of brain cells together for me regarding CC --  
> originally, this was "Carbon Copy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 
> Carbon_copy) when sheets of carbon paper were actually forced  
> through the platens with additional sheets of paper, and while it  
> should have migrated in meaning to "Courtesy Copy", I think most  
> people still have a deep structure map to the words "carbon copy"  
> even if they've never seen carbon paper in their lives.
>
> In e-mail and calendaring, the "cc" field is used for a number of  
> purposes, seldom used well.
> Things I'd like to do well with courtesy copies:
> Items received when I'm on the CC list should be clearly marked  
> that I am not a primary recipient, to make it clear that I probably  
> don't need to reply
> It would be nice in some cases to send a courtesy copy without  
> dumping 10MB of attachments on someone who really only needs to  
> know that the message was indeed sent (perhaps a 'receipt copy'?)
> Calendaring should permit courtesy copies sent to users who are  
> expected not to show up -- again, notification is the critical  
> factor here, and it shouldn't clutter up their calendar with  
> nonsense meeting requests.
> And if we're voting, I'll go in favor of renaming From and To  
> depending on context. Especially in the case of calendaring where  
> an administrative assistant does the scheduling, it can be
> "From" ker, with the "Organizer" ker boss.  Pardon the gender- 
> nonspecific pronouns.  I'm not normally prone to them.
>
> What about task assignment and workflow?  If Pat assigns a task to  
> Terry, who delegates it to Casey... who is it "From" and who is it  
> "To"?  When Casey finishes the assignment and sends it to Taylor  
> for review... who is the task "From"?
>
> Joel Finkle, PMP
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