• Found on Slashdot: Gabor’s Blog: How Researchers are Reinventing the Mail Client,
• Then repeated and expanded upon in http://www.hawkwings.net/.

Every so often, someone comes around with a brilliant idea about how to improve the email experience. The results of this brainstorming never seem to trickle down to any email clients. I would guess that it’s because the actual benefit of them is questionable or they would be too difficult to use or even implement.

A task-based reader seems like a good idea and fits with how we all use email in our day jobs. Email from some people (or frequently from systems) is more likely to be related to a task. Being able to flag it as an item of interest, possibly with a category would allow the reader to more easily bucket their work. Items in threads of categorized work or tasks would give a timeline for that task. We have all these pieces already, but no-one has bothered to tie them together in a way that doesn’t involve lots of clicking and menu operations.

Prioritizing these items would be a useful next step. Associating them with some sort of top-level task viewer would be even nicer — possibly in a calendaring application and maybe with some pretty charts and graphs. This seems like more than a simple “tagging” system but a mechanism to actually track work and examine progress.

I think I’m one of the few people who still believe in an application client for mail and news. As more and more of my colleagues move to web-based systems, I’m wondering if the Email “app” is doomed? I still think there’s a place for “fat” email clients. The ability for an application to provide rich user experiences and perform complex manipulations on data shouldn’t be overlooked.

PS, Congratulations to Italy on their World Cup Victory!