Who Else Wants Their Email Client to Evolve?
Most of us use email daily, if not hourly or even by the minute, it is the most active medium for digital communication. However, email client developers seem to have invented the wheel, the engine, and the chassis but then haven’t bothered with the adjustable seat or the air conditioning – especially when compared to the social scene (e.g. Facebook) or the mobile scene (e.g. iPhone).
Yes, email is still king, check out this infographic to read a few incredible stats such as “Nearly 4 times as many emails are sent each day as the total number of Facebook/Twitter updates, Google/Yahoo!/Bing searches and Internet pageviews combined” – completely eliminating any rumours of email dying off!
Nevertheless, much like a Toyota Corolla, email does what it needs to most of the time, but don’t expect the same luxuries you might from the latest Mercedes-Benz. Through all its years of use and popularity – email remains a functional tool, particularly for business users as a professional form of communication.
A colleague of mine facebooked emailed me last week to complain about how “backwards email is” as well as sharing a few great insights into the typical email user’s experience with their email software. Here are the points he made:
- Email signatures should be classed as separate entities by the email program (e.g. Lotus Notes or Outlook), enabling them to be removed or hidden by the user if desired.
- Email thread headers (e.g. “From”, “Sent”) should also split along the same lines as the email signature to be viewed or not as desired.
- These changes should, in turn, allow users the choice to hide these fields for personal contact or show them for business use.
These days it’s all about user experience, so why is email lagging so far behind the conveniences of chat or SMS? Let’s have a look at one particular conversation compared across the two different mediums…
To quote Tom Lynch-Watson, “The phone still tells you who it is and exactly when each message was sent. Email sucks”. We know that emails require a professional look as well as remaining 100% compliant according to the latest regulations, but surely email clients could become slightly more user friendly. Sure, certain email clients have developed a chat interface (e.g. Sametime for Lotus Notes), but that’s not email – it just doesn’t work the same.
We still want to email each other, we just don’t want a five minute conversation to look like a 100 page business take-over contract!
Wish someone had shown Harry and Ron how to use Lotus Notes properly. At least they appear to be on the latest version (!). This entire conversation could have been shrunk dramatically by choosing the REPLY button, and then selecting REPLY (only) instead of REPLY WITH HISTORY. From any view in Lotus Notes they could then have hit the Twistie next to any one of these messages that would have shown the conversation in a very similar manner as the iPhone SMS screen-shot. Lotus Notes … Email. Evolved.
(Note: this comment is intended to be tongue-in-cheek ;-) )
What with all their Death-Eater fighting and Voldemort dueling, our only guess is that they were simply too busy with life to be taught these vital things!
I am not sure if this is the place to make suggestions about Lotus Notes email but if there is such a place please let me know.
How often do you want to send an email with attachments and keep a copy but without the attachments. I created the attachments, I don’t need a copy in the saved copy of the email message. I want to be able to selectively choose who gets the attachments and who does not without having to send multiple messages.
Cheers
Hi Don,
You are most welcome to make your suggestions here. The other places worth noting would be in these threads on the Linkedin Lotus Notes group at http://linkd.in/u2o9Ay and http://linkd.in/u6gmlN – It would be interesting to see what your comment attracts in those!
Right now, the closest relating feature would be DAOS (Domino Attachment Object Service). This removes attachments from the Domino database and stores them on the file store. A single copy is stored for multiple identical attachments and the email body holds a “ticket” referencing the DB.
I.e. When you mail 20 people with the attachment – only one copy of the attachment is stored.
Hope that helps!