[Design] Bridging the gap - email options

[Philippe Bossut]

Hi,

Answer in line:

Mimi Yin wrote:
> Can I bug you with a few more questions to clarify your workflow?
> + Are these rules primarily for mailing lists?
Yes, primarily
> + If the above is true, would you filter all of your mailing list 
> emails into Chandler?
No, most of the mailing list work is just about reading and writing, not 
focused on projects per se. Ideally of course, I'd like to have 
*everything* in Chandler (so that I can sort, search, tag, etc...) but 
for that I'll need a rather full featured set of email functionalities.
> + Do you have rules for auto-filtering emails that represent tasks for 
> you? Could you provide some examples?
No, I don't.
> I think the point I'm trying to get across is that it's going to be 
> very hard for people to come up with a priori rules that 'auto-select 
> emails they will want to keep track of in Chandler'.
Possibly... Though if I put in Chandler all emails that contain my 
address in the To or Cc fields (minus spam...), that's a rather good 
proxy of 'project emails' (for me at least).
> In other words, I think the most likely 'Email client-Chandler' bridge 
> scenario in the Beta timeframe is: Users hand-pick 'signal' out of 
> 'noise' from their email clients to add to Chandler via one of the 
> following mechanisms:
> + Drag and drop,
> + Drag and drop to IMAP folder
> + Flag emails + set up IMAP folder to automatically pick up flagged items
That sounds about right.
> BONUS scenario:
> + Select a few rule-based IMAP folders that are of great importance to 
> me to auto-dump all emails in that folder into Chandler. e.g. I might 
> do that with the design list because basically every email to the 
> design list is a task on my todo list.
>
> Performance-wise, in the Beta timeframe, is Chandler going to be ready 
> to deal with all of the noise from people's email clients as well as 
> the signals? (My worry is that if people start populating Chandler 
> with rule-based IMAP folders, they will end up with a lot of noise in 
> Chandler.)
If we have such a perf challenge (whether the repo has issues or the UI 
workflow is inadequate), we better know about this *now*. I mean: the 
sooner we address those, the better. Having to struggle with them before 
we implement a complete email client is a good thing IMHO.
> Personally, from a design standpoint, I don't feel that Chandler will 
> be ready to deal with both noise AND signal. The NOW section of the 
> Dashboard (given the design we have in the Alpha 4 spec) could be 
> easily overwhelmed with too many irrelevant emails.
Well, may be we shouldn't get everything in NOW per default then. I 
mentioned in a design session that, IMO, having a Not Triaged status was 
important. To me at least, the 3 important status are Now, Later and Not 
Triaged. Done is not very important (shouldn't be under my nose at 
least, more like some sort of archive status).
> I think it's great that you would move task management workflows over 
> to Chandler, but I'm not sure we can depend on all users to do that. I 
> think we need to provide users with workflow ramps to gently nudge 
> them towards depending on Chandler more and more over time by allowing 
> them to keep their umbilical cord to their Inbox / Task list intact.
I might be an extreme case but, of course, I have a special motivation 
to make this work!... :) That being said, my intention is to have all 
task management workflow in Chandler. Having only part of it seems 
really hard to manage quite frankly...
>> It seems like the optimal workflow would be to set up a rule to 
>> 'Copy' flagged items to the Chandler IMAP folder, while
>  allowing users to keep an eye on flagged items in their Inbox.
Yes, I think I agree with you. It would allow the maximum flexibility 
and wouldn't prevent me to "move" instead of "copy" those emails if I 
really wanted to. Looks like the place where an "à la Chris" extension 
would be a great help (a "mark for Chandler to pick" button in the 
Thunderbird toolbar). Having this extension for Outlook would be a 
better angle though from a market share standpoint.

Cheers,
- Philippe