[Design] Bridging the gap - email options

[Philippe Bossut]

Mimi Yin wrote:
> On Jul 13, 2006, at 7:43 PM, Katie Capps Parlante wrote:
>>> + Drag and drop emails and attachments from other email clients.
>> Observation:
>> - one advantage of the IMAP solution is that you can create a rule to 
>> copy items as they come in, vs moving them by hand.
> For some scenarios this will work. But rules and filters are still 
> IMAP client features that are beyond a lot of people. It's also 
> extremely difficult, if not impossible to set up a rule or filter for: 
> Emails that will require follow-up.
True but having a rule to populate an IMAP "To Chandler" folder does not 
prevent individual emails to be dragged and dropped manually in it. I do 
that all the time because my simple rules cannot capture every 
categorization subtleties.

I personally like the IMAP solution better because drag and drop from an 
app to another is  error prone and cumbersome on my screen real estate 
challenged iBook... I currently never DnD between apps because of this. 
I wonder how many users with similar machines do DnD between apps.
> Mostly, this solution has the highest chance of discoverability. It 
> requires no setup on the part of the user, other than to download and 
> install Chandler. Everything else requires some minimal amount of 
> understanding of accounts and servers.
True again but the IMAP solution will bring Chandler much closer to a 
real email solution with an embryonic IMAP workflow. We shouldn't fool 
ourselves: if indeed rules and filters are beyond the cognitive 
abilities of our target user, we'll have to implement a full blown email 
client in Chandler sooner rather than later. For the "bridge" solution, 
we should choose something which is a stepping stone toward that full 
solution.

Cheers,
- Philippe