Curiouser and Curiouser! on email

Radio vs. Email

Sat, 22 Jun 2002 01:32:39 +0100

Steve Yost on ubiquitous collaboration tools. Steve Yost, inventor and proprietor of QuickTopic, disagrees with David Weinberger's assertion that collaborative software fails to thrive because companies are afraid to "hyperlink the hierarchy." The real problem is more mundane, Steve says: ... [Jon's Radio]

An intriguing hypothesis on the challenges of getting new technology ideas to take root in organizations

[McGee's Musings]

» Interesting. From a quick scan I'm not sure how QuickTopic differs from, say, using a Yahoo group where participants can either use it as a list (with single & digest options) or a web forum. I have switched from reading radio-dev as a list to using it as a web forum. But that's because I use Outlook for most of my email and it just sucks, sucks, sucks!

But beyond that I would be looking for radio-dev to arrive as an RSS feed. In fact much of the stuff I currently receive as email would be better arriving in my Radio news aggregator. Of course, at that point my aggregator is going to have to become a lot smarter and work much harder for me.

The other technology that could do for email is Instant Outlining (IO). Radio is getting interesting in this regard. It's going to take a lot of work to make it a killer app, but it's certainly on that track.

As someone else has said, Radio: the best $40 I ever spent on software!

Blogging by email

Sun, 30 Jun 2002 21:45:26 +0100

Radio wishlist > Post to email..

Dale Pike writes:

I want to be able to designate a category and have that post sent as an email message to a pre-determined address. This would allow me to further consolidate my communications and have a more streamlined "write once" approach to my messaging.

[a klog apart]

» I need exactly the same thing to keep legacy people in the loop. I'm trying to knock up something very quickly as a tool in Radio.

Basic features:

preferences per- subscriber email

filter by category & by liveTopic

immediately, hourly or daily feedings

send either complete post or permalink+title

I had originally thought about making it a program that subscribed to an RSS feed and emailed it out. However this seemed like a lot of work and a way of re-inventing my.userland. I'm trying to KISS!

k-log vs. email

Fri, 12 Jul 2002 21:33:44 +0100

Reuters: Managers drowning in e-mail.

>>>A huge volume of business e-mails is generated from workers reporting progress to project managers, Nickerson said. <<< There is an answer to this: post it to your K-Log. K-Logs are more passive and user friendly than e-mail. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

[Jim McGee: Blogging] [Ron Lusk: Ron's K-Logs]

» I shall be leveraging this argument quite heavily I think.

Savvy people already realise that email is the rope they've tied around their neck. I think they are just afraid to do anything different in case they pull the handle for the trapdoor.

Hopefully the k-log message will resonate with these people in a good way.

Email vs. k-logging

Mon, 15 Jul 2002 22:23:33 +0100

Email Email Everywhere.

E-Mail Storage Issues Facing North American Companies

According to a recently-released whitepaper from Osterman Research, 31% of North American companies say the average size of an e-mail mailbox in their message system is between 26 and 50 megabytes (Mb). Additionally, 46% of these companies say that e-mail users in their system send up to 50 messages per day....

There has to be a way for k-logging to help with this for at least a percentage of these people. Luckily, we don't have quotas in place at SLS or else my external email would be a real problem. Here I am with my own blog, I'm trying to move into k-logging, and I really haven't integrated email into that equation yet. How on earth am I going to get my staff to do this?

Are there any guidelines out there yet for how to integrate various information sources (web, email, chat, etc.) into a k-log, or is the format still too young?

[The Shifted Librarian]

» Too many good questions here I'm afraid.

My experience of KM leads me to expect that k-logging will not provide a turn-key answer to managing email. What it will do is, in all practical terms, to kill email. That's the solution.

Many of the business contexts for e-mail could be replaced by publish & subscribe RSS feeds and Wiki leaving e-mail purely for private correspondance. If we could solve this spam thing too then you might see mailboxs drop back to pre-1996 levels again.

I'd be interesting to hear what other people think on this topic.

A sad event...

Tue, 27 Aug 2002 12:05:44 +0100

It's a sad day. I knew it would come though. I guess a month isn't too bad.

My new Novissio email account received it's first piece of confirmed spam!

Luckily SpamNet was there to catch it :-)

e-mail response management

Tue, 05 Nov 2002 18:51:35 +0000

I've just had a chat with the guys from Neotonic who make the Trakken e-mail response and FAQ management software. A lot of the intelligence that makes Yahoo groups work is at work behind Trakken. If you need e-mail management I suggest you check 'em out.

To be free of Outlook?

Thu, 07 Nov 2002 15:55:41 +0000

W a r m b r a i n: Mail from Aggregator. The spaces buzz is building. Can't wait to try spaces out.

But what if you could take it a step further though? Wouldn't it be easier to just have the news aggregator incorporated into your email client? Merge the notions of 'get new mail' and 'get new news' into a single application that already has the read-offline paradigm build in. This would avoid the hassle of having to configure the news aggregator to retrieve the RSS feed once, parse it, repackage it and then send it back onto the network to be retrieved by email. Wouldn't it rock if there was an imminent release of just such a product? But there is! Diego Doval's spaces is exactly that product and it can do all I mentioned above and a whole lot more.
[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

» Finally, a chance to be free of Outlook? Beyond my wildest dreams!

Inbox Buddy released

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 12:50:04 +0000

Inbox Buddy 1.0 Now Available !!!!!.

Inbox Buddy 1.0 Now Available !!!!!

[The FuzzyBlog!]

» Congrats to Scott & Brian. I hope the hard work pays off for you guys.

For anyone cursed with having to use Outlook (I'm keeping a watchful eye on Spaces) Inbox Buddy is definitely worth checking out.

I need a new mail client

Thu, 06 Nov 2003 06:47:34 +0000

I hate Outlook more and more with every day I draw breath. It's been my primary email client for about 2 years since it was mandated by my previous company and, when I got the next version with Office Professional, I resolved to persevere with it hoping that my list of gripes would have been addressed, somewhat, in the upgrade.

I was wrong.

Among it's many catalogue of bone headed behaviours and incomprehensible problems is the new superpower of thrashing the CPU @ 100% whilst simultaneously failing to do anything useful about collecting my email. I could go on and catalogue the litany of abuses Outlook has heaped upon me like rules only seem to work and so on but what's the point? Even if you cared Microsoft will never fix them.

I would love to hear from you if you have a recommendation for a new email client. Two concerns I have are losing CloudMark SpamNet and the email scanning via McAfee.

Any suggestions?

Client vs. Client

Fri, 07 Nov 2003 10:27:28 +0000

Today I'm looking at Eudora 6.0 and Thunderbird Milestone 3 email clients. My first impressions of Eudora is not positive. I find the interface confusing (and I don't think it's because I'm an Outlook user) and it seemed to take forever to display messages. That said lots of people use Eudora so I need to give it a fair shake. I felt rather more at home with Thunderbird and it seemed to work quite smoothly. More later...

Fullscale Email client evaluation

Fri, 07 Nov 2003 17:07:57 +0000

So far I've had 4 email client recommendations

Eudora
Thunderbird
Incredimail
TheBat
CleverCactus (I knew about this one anyway)

I've decided to try and use Thunderbird as my client for a little while to establish a baseline for what I can expect from a free client. I'm concerned that there are people making a living from mail clients and my company can afford to buy me one. I won't be unduly dropping a commercial product if it delivers good features and value for money.

I have to say I really didn't take to Eudora on first opening it and my initial experience of setting up the account and trying to retrieve mail didn't warm me to it. Given I have 4 other clients to choose from I'm not sure i'll bother evaluating it further. What I can say already is that, as an email client (leaving aside all other concerns), Thunderbird has Outlook 2002 whipped. You're not surpised? Shame on you ;-)

Lastly I'd love to hear any more client recommendations (esp. why you recommend a particular client) and am grateful for any links to pertinent reviews etc.

Another one for the list

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 13:08:07 +0000

Bloomba - search-based e-mail client.

Enter Bloomba. I cant even begin to explain how it works (Im sure Ill stare at it long enough to figure it out, but right now I dont really care): it just works. The idea is that instead of using folders to sort your e-mail, it indexes everything. Want to find a message? Just type in the words that describe the e-mail. Searches Ive done have taken less than a second. This is the first time Ive felt like I can Google my e-mail. (Yes, this contradicts what I said the other day. Maybe this is an answer?) You can still use folders if you want to, but after just a few hours of use I can see how folders become far less important.

By rick@rklau.com (Rick Klau). [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

Thanks for the pointer Rick. Added to the list.

More on email clients

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 10:42:48 +0000

Some observations about Mozilla Thunderbird as a mail client.

First of all, it's very good. By which I mean it seems quite polished, the interface is neat and responsive (take note Outlook) and best of all it's multi-threaded. Why Microsoft cannot cope with the idea that I might want to do other things whilst it churns through mailboxes downloading spam is a mystery best known to themselves.

The filters are very good and seem to work reliably (again not something I associate with Outlook). One thing I particularly like is that you can actually specify which header you're filtering on. I've come across one glitch (in bugzilla) where it treats Sender as From: hopefully that will be fixed in a later build but it's nothing that can't be worked around so far.

Another thing I like is that you can define filters to apply instantaenously in your inbox. So I can create a filter for Paolo's messages and just apply that. It's much more convenient than searching given that I look through his messages a lot.

One thing which is not an improvement from my perspective is the separation of mailboxes. I mean, I can see why some people might want to work that way & keep everything separate. I'd rather just chuck everything into one mailbox and start from there. But, whilst I could filter all messages into a local folder I can't run further filters from there. I guess it's not a problem, but it's not comfortable for me. We'll see how that goes.

Unanswered questions are still:

How good is the junk filtering, i'm not convinced it's as good as SpamNet but I have no idea how long you need to train it and it gives me no feedback
Will I be hurt by the lack of integration with my anti-virus software & is there a way to fix that?

My box summary so far is that I see a lot to like and I would be happy to advise anyone not totally happy with Outlook to give Thunderbird a try. My thanks to Jon for the initial suggestion to me.

I'm going to stick with Thunderbird for a few more days, then try TheBat and Bloomba.

Not very happy

Wed, 12 Nov 2003 10:24:51 +0000

Well Outlook is working at the moment, seemingly. But Bloomba spent 13hrs importing and only got 14% (about 2,500 messages) of the way through before I had to stop it. It had my CPU at 100% (Bloomba not Outlook) and I need my computer back. At this rate importing will take about 4 days to finish importing all the messages. I'm also not convinvced that it is entirely Outlook to blame here since Bloomba took about 5 minutes of 100% CPU to delete those messages after I cancelled the import.

This sucks.

So you can have too much of a good thing...

Wed, 12 Nov 2003 21:56:42 +0000

I must confess that I've rather grown to like Thunderbird since I started using it. I thought that, since I am soon to try Bloomba and then TheBat that I would check out some of the extensions and see if they addressed the few shortcomings I see. You can imagine my pleasure when I not only see a way of toggling the preview pane but also macros & sticky notes as well.

Sadly, however, this was my downfall. I installed these extensions and another which lets you grab addresses easily from messages. I restarted Thurnderbird as requested and all seemed well. I was able to turn off the preview pane (heaven!) Then I double clicked an email and Thunderbird crashed.

Ouch!

"Okay," thought I, "lets dump the extensions for now." But no, Thunderbird now crashes as soon as I open it. Anyone know a manual procedure for removing extensions from your profile?

I guess the morale is: If you're more or less happy with a version 0.3 beta of a product, don't get greedy.

---

Update: Well how odd, Thunderbird crashed 3 times in a row so I decided to leave it alone until I next restarted. Then a couple of minutes ago I wanted to email someone and reflexively started it up and.... no crash. I've disabled the extensions for now and am happy again. Thank you Thunderbird!

Mail accounts come in six-packs now

Sat, 07 Aug 2004 10:33:31 +0100

Mailinator. I love this service. Mailinator Get enough SPAM lately? Have you ever gone to a website that asks for your email address for no reason (other than they are going to sell it to the highest bidder so you get... [Get Real]

Very handy.

Revolutionary new email technique

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 09:11:49 +0000

Don't study my replies to your emails too closely in the future.