Despite many different innovations from many different directions to try and revolutionize text communication, the humble email has lived on. The use of emails and email clients has adapted to current demands. The authors of this paper conduct investigations of the current needs of email users through a workshop and a survey, and they analyze open source code repositories that were performing things on email, in order to identify what are the current users needs, what is not being solved by existing clients, and what tasks are people taking the initiative to solve programmatically that their email clients don’t solve. They identify several high level categories of needs: the need for additional metadata on the email, the ability to leverage internal and external context, managing attention, not overburdening the receiver, and automated content processing and aggregation. They create a python tool called YouPS that provides an API with which a user can write scripts to perform some email automation tasks. They study the users of their tool for a week and note the kind of work they automate with the tool. They found that about 40% of the rules the users created with YouPS could not be done within their ordinary email client.
It’s fascinating that there is so much efficiency that can be obtained by allowing people to manage their email programmatically. I feel like something like this should’ve been a solved problem but apparently there is still room for innovation. It’s also possible that what YouPS provides is something that couldn’t really be done in an existing client, either because an existing client is trying to be as user friendly as possible to the widest variety of people (how many people actually know what IMAP does?). Alternatively, it could be a result of email clients just having accumulated so much cruft that adding a programmable layer would be incredibly hard. I get the reason why their survey participants skew towards computer science students, and how their solution gravitates towards solving the email problem in a way that is better suited for people who are in computer science. But I also think that, in the long term, keeping YouPS the way it is is the right way to go. With every additional layer of abstraction you add, you lose flexibility. GUIs are not the way to go but rather that people will adapt to using the programming API as programming becomes more prevalent in daily life. I also find the idea of modes really interesting and useful and would definitely be something I would like to have in my email clients.
- What kind of modes would you set up with different sets of rules e.g. a research mode, a weekend mode?
- Do you think that changing YouPS to be more GUI based would be beneficial because it would reach a wider audience? Or should it keep its flexibility at the cost of maybe not having wide spread adoption?
- How would you think about training an ML model that can capture internal and external context in your email?
