In this paper, the authors explore the kinds of automated functionalities or needs for E-mail interfaces users would want. The authors held workshops with technical and non-technical people to learn about these needs. The authors found the need for functionalities such as additional or richer E-mail data models involving latent information, internal or external context, using mark-as-read to control notifications, self-destructing event E-mails, different representation of E-mail threads, and content processing. Afterward, the authors mined Github repositories that actually held implementation of E-mail automation and labeled them. The authors found prevalent implementations were on automizing repetitive processing tasks. Outside the needs identified from their first probe, the authors also found needs such as using the E-mail inbox as middleware and analyzing E-mail statistics. The authors did a final study by providing users with their own programmable E-mail inbox interface called YouPS.
I really enjoyed reading the section about probes 2 and 3 where actual implementations were done using IMAP libraries. I especially like the one about notifying the respondent using flashing visuals on a Raspberry PI. It looks like a very creative and fun project. I also noticed that many of the automation were in processing repetitive tasks. This again confirms the machine affordance about being able to process many repetitive tasks.
I personally thought YouPS to be a very useful tool. I also frequently have trouble organizing my tens of thousands of unread E-mails comprising of main advertisements. I think YouPS could serve me nicely in fixing this. I found that YouPS is public and accessible online (https://youps.csail.mit.edu/editor). I will definitely return to this interface once time permits and start dealing with my monstrosity of an inbox. YouPS addresses nicely the complexity of developing a custom inbox management system. I am not familiar with the concept of IMAPs, which hinders me from implementing E-mail related functionalities in my personal projects. A library like YouPS that simplifies the protocol would be very valuable to me.
The followings are the questions that I had while reading this paper.
1. What kind of E-mail automation would you want to make given the ability to make any automation functionality?
2. The authors mentioned in their limitations that their study’s participants were mostly technical programmers. What difference would there be between programmers and non-programmers? If the study was able to be done with only non-programmers do you think the authors would have seen a different result? Is there something specifically relevant to programmers that resulted in the existing implementations of E-mail automation? For example, maybe programmers usually deal with more technical E-mails?
2. What interface is desirable for non-programmers to meet their needs? The paper mentions that one participant did not like that current interfaces required many clicks and typing to create an automation rule and they didn’t even work properly. What would be a good way for non-programmers to develop an automation rule? The creation of a rule requires a lot of logical thinking comprising of many if-statements. What would be a minimum requirement or qualification for non-programmers to create an automation rule?
I looked at the YouPS link you posted and I will also definitely look into it (as and when time permits) to tackle my personal mailbox. So thank you for the link!
With respect to your last question, this is something that I wondered about as well – especially when I was trying to analyze how my mum would use such a system. She uses here mailbox frequently, but isn’t a programmer. One method that came to my mind was the use of a drag and drop interface similar to ones that enable users to create HTML pages. It could have a set of pre-coded functions which would then enable non-programmers to combine these into the set of rules needed by them. I think it would be interesting to see non-programmers use such a system in order to determine if it would indeed be helpful to them.