
Persona - A concept email client - basil
http://personamail.info/
======
jgrahamc
I shall now deploy my catch phrase: Shut Up and Ship!
(<http://blog.jgc.org/2010/08/shut-up-and-ship.html>) which I probably stole
from Zawodny.

The concept video is very annoying because of the 'arty' way it's been filmed.
They have shown three ideas: sort mail by sender, sort by conversation and
show me all attachments. So far, so good. What they haven't mentioned is any
form of search functionality or foldering. Looking at my inbox right now I see
a set of separate conversations from different people about the same topic (in
this case, OSCON). What you want to get on top of email is automatic foldering
(pet topic) so that you get an intelligent view of your email.

What's shown in the video seems to be pretty basic wrapped up in a flowery
dress to make it look like something amazing. I can believe that people would
appreciate clean email interfaces, but this seems like it doesn't take into
account real world stuff like figuring out who's cc:ed on a message or what
the subject line is, or what happens when an exchange of messages stops being
between two people and starts being between three or more.

~~~
Derbasti
Which is to say, it does not match your style of interacting with email. Many
Gmail users out there (Facebook mail, even?) are using email very differently
and programs like this (Sparrow, Lion Mail) are catering for them.

Personally, I don't ever use folders. I've been there, and I'm glad I got it
over with. I have no use whatsoever for Outlook-like complexity and complex
rule sets. And please don't think that this is just because I don't deal with
email a lot. But there are different kinds of people who use email in
different ways. To each his own.

~~~
wyclif
What is the best material you've read on why folders in email are inefficient?
Do you have a blog post, paper, &c. that would be good reading on this
subject?

~~~
Derbasti
My initial inspiration came from [Nick Cernis' take on Inbox
Zero](<http://modernerd.com/post/348119427/inbox-heaven>). The article is a
bit dated by now, but the gist is:

There are only three kinds of messages: messages I have to act on, messages I
want to keep and the rest.

The first, I flag and archive, the second, I archive, the third, I delete. The
list of flagged messages then becomes my todo-list. If I ever need to go back
to some discussion I did not flag, I rely on search. This really only works if
threads are collated into conversations. Contrary to the original article
though, this feature is not exclusive to Gmail any more, so that particular
advice can be ignored.

I believe that this is one implementation of 'inbox zero', for which you
should find plenty of stuff on the 'net (43Folders and Merlin Mann should be
great starting points).

That said, I never claimed that folders are _inefficient_ for email. I just
said that my system did not involve any. That said, there are a lot of people
who will say that a good searching mechanism is more convenient than a complex
folder structure. (And conversely, that you only need folders if your search
sucks. Search has gotten a lot better in the last few years.)

One might argue that the whole point of our brain is to recognize patterns.
Therefore, we are very very good at grasping the context an email message
belongs to. Maybe we don't actually need folders to signify context
externally. Also, tagging seems to be a more natural way of providing context
than folders, for the simple fact that messages might belong to different
contexts simultaneously. Still, the only context I need in an email app is
whether something is actionable or not. Everything else is just noise.

~~~
coliveira
This is similar to the way I use gmail: everything that I need to act on is
kept on inbox. Everything else is either archived (I might need), or deleted.
This way, I never have to look for mail inside folders. If I need something, I
just search it.

~~~
dugmartin
I recently activated the multiple inbox feature in Google Labs. I have two
inboxes showing now - the default one and starred email. Since the space is
free I just archive everything and rely on stars to note email that I need to
either act on or contains some info I need to finish a feature.

------
beaumartinez
I don't normally mind artsy but this is _ridiculous_. The video is zoomed,
focused, and tilted to excess. Am I supposed to get a meaningful impression of
it that way?

~~~
geraldalewis
I was at a bar with a friend the other night, and he took a picture using a
flash. I took one by holding very still so I could take a longer exposure
without the flash. His image accurately recorded the scene in detail. Mine
recorded the feel.

I think you're supposed to get an emotional impression, instead of an explicit
idea of how the software works.

~~~
jacques_chester
My emotional impression was that I couldn't see the bloody software. It was
more like a wedding movie for the MacBooks than a product presentation.

------
micheljansen
For a concept based on "a critical analysis of how people manage their emails
and use their email clients" it contains an awful lot of design flaws.

The general workflow is pretty cool; different view modes, conversations etc.
but then I see how the mother writes an email in the video (between 0:35 and
0:55) and I am surprised she can figure anything out.

The email pane is an intimidating white modal window, that does not give any
visual cues as to what you can do with it. How can I drag it? Can I type
anywhere? How do I send or dismiss it? To whom will it be sent?

Apparently messages have a subject (at least they are still email), but this
is implicit. Having taught some older people how to use email, I know they
struggle a lot with the concept of having a subject and they often confuse
message and subject. With this subject, I am pretty sure the average "mom"
will end up sending every message with the subject "Dear David" or something
like that.

The sequence is concluded by the woman sending the email (around 0:53). She
moves the mouse to the bottom of the message and all of a sudden a fucking
tool bar pops up out of nowhere. There is no indication that that thing was
even there, so how is anyone going to know that was there to begin with?

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot that can be improved about the way we
interact with email, and there are a lot of things in this concept that I
really like (for example the contact-list on the left, allowing you to drop a
photo on a person's face to send it to them), but they introduce new flaws
that are unacceptable. The footer of the page says the authors are from the
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, so I would have expected that
rather than spending a lot of time on creating a sexy video (mission
accomplished) they had put their concept to the test with some actual users.
No doubt these flaws would have come to light immediately.

------
Derbasti
They are advancing the concept of 'conversations' that Gmail introduced in an
interesting direction. Basically, the second tab at the top is the Gmail
conversation view. This view collects emails by topic, which makes it behave
more like a threaded discussion board in a way.

The interesting part is the first tab though, the 'people' view. They seem to
go for an IM-style persistent conversation log between a fixed set of people.
That is quite an interesting way of looking at conversations, pushing email
further from the original 'digital letter' towards shorter, more transient
messages. Basically, it tries to make email behave more like a persistent IM
chat.

I find it interesting how the email protocol gets pushed more and more in the
background and applications implement their own interfaces on top of it. Email
seems to evolve from the definite way of sending stuff over the internet
towards just one other communication protocol that is more or less on equal
footing with, say, Jabber, or Facebook, or maybe even Twitter.

What with Facebook integrating email into its site and Google dumping IM chat
logs in your Gmail inbox, there is even some sort of cross-protocol talk. This
gets even more obvious with Facebook or Google+ or Twitter sending you emails
whenever you receive messages on their platform. Now if you could reply to
these emails and the platform would 'do the right thing', this would actually
implement email as a ubiquitous interface to all of these services.

Interesting times!

~~~
jorangreef
The concept screenshots have been designed using data that displays well in an
IM-style conversation log, but how would it work for traditionally formatted
email (e.g. Dear, regards, long signature, messy disclaimer, quoted text, html
newsletters)? That is where the sender has one idea of how email should look
like, and the receiver has another?

~~~
Derbasti
I would guess that just like in Gmail, quoted texts get collapsed, signatures
get faded. Basically, Gmail works, too, so this is probably a solved problem.

And personally, I think the world would be a better place without disclaimers
anyway, so they might as well delete them outright. But maybe that is just me.

------
krmmalik
Shame all the innovation in email clients seems to be happening predominantly
on the Mac. Havent seen any Windows versions of any of these kind of apps.

I wonder if we'll ever see an iPad version of anything like this, because i'd
certainly be interested. On a side note, this further cements the idea that
its still worthwhile to disrupt boring or old markets if they havent had
disruption for a long time.

~~~
Derbasti
Maybe this is because Windows is still predominantly a business market (except
for games), where feature lists are more important than elegance or
simplicity. Hence Outlook and its kin.

~~~
mattmanser
Kin? There's just outlook these days.

~~~
Derbasti
Isn't there, like, Eudora and some Oracle stuff, and several other corporate
content management blobs that do complex email management, too?

~~~
dragonquest
Pegasus Mail (<http://www.pmail.com>) is still going strong, slowly trudging
towards the 5.0 release. Though there were a few hiccups related to the
financial viability a couple of years ago, development is still going on and
the product is still free.

------
geuis
1) Build it. Concept videos are nice and all, but its vaporware till people
can use it.

2) I think most people these days have switched to webmail in one form or
another. Build this as a web app, not a strict desktop client. Also, as a web
app its relatively easy these days to wrap it in a framework that will present
it as a desktop app if someone wants to use it that way.

~~~
nhebb
_2) I think most people these days have switched to webmail in one form or
another_

If you're interested in stats, Campaign Monitor posts a monthly report on
email client popularity: <http://www.campaignmonitor.com/stats/email-clients/>

Also note the Movers and Shakers stats at the bottom.

~~~
danohuiginn
There sure is a lot written about gmail, relative to its market share.
apparently hotmail and yahoo mail are both more popular.

~~~
judofyr
Note the fine print:

 _The email client a person is using can only be detected if images are
displayed. This can give an inflated weighting to email clients that display
images by default, such as Outlook 2000 and the iPhone. It will also provide a
lesser weighting to those that block images by default such as Gmail and
Outlook 2007. Those email clients that aren't capable of displaying images,
such as older Blackberry models and other mobile devices cannot be included in
this study._

~~~
mike-cardwell
I've found tonnes of flaws in email clients where they fetch remote content
even when they're configured not to, or the "Fetch Images" button hasn't been
pressed.

An interesting tit bit of information: The basic (non IE) version of Outlook
Web Access for Exchange 2007 blocks <img src="blah"> by default, but it
actually fetches <input type="image" src="blah">

I've found a couple of similar issues in iOS and Apple Mail in the past which
have now been fixed. Even if you disabled loading remote images by default, it
would still fetch the contents of <audio> and <video> tags. This was fixed
after I reported it. Then later, it started performing DNS prefetches before
clicking "Load Images" if you included a tag like this: <link rel="dns-
prefetch" href="[http://blah/>](http://blah/>);

Thunderbird had the dns prefetching flaw too. I reported that one and it was
fixed.

Android had multiple problems last time I checked. It would even honour meta
refresh tags and bounce you off to the web browser automatically, just from
opening an email. Scary. I might give that another test soon.

I found similar flaws in Roundcube and OpenWebmail which were subsequently
fixed after I reported them.

I built an automated testing tool a while ago which sends a specially crafted
email to an address of your choice which includes lots of tricks to try and
get your email client to call back to my server. You can check it out here:

<https://grepular.com/email_privacy_tester/>

I haven't found any issues with the gmail, hotmail or yahoo web interfaces, so
there's no point testing those clients using my interface.

Gmail used to display SVG attachments which contained JavaScript, letting an
email sender completely take over your email client. Someone else reported
that and they fixed it.

------
markokocic
Seems like the concept of providing more "human" or "natural" interaction
between user and computer is becoming more and more pervasive, and Persona is
just another example about that.

I don't know what to think about it. As a casual user, I like it. It make
interaction with the computer effortless. On the other side, as a power user,
I still like to Unix philosophy of small powerfull tools and an easy ways to
combine and automate them.

I really hope someone will eventually find a way to mix both of those concepts
and bring software to the next level.

------
dfischer
I really don't want to use desktop software anymore. Am I the only one that
feels this way?

~~~
mvzink
No, you seem to be with the majority. But I really don't want to use web
software any more. I might be the only one, but hopefully not.

~~~
TeMPOraL
You're not the only one. I don't really like web applications too. It is
irrational of me, but I really feel better about desktop, on-line software. I
think I don't really trust "the Internet" and "the Cloud", and would like my
computer to be usable even after the whole networking infrastructure burns
down.

~~~
gjm11
I tend to feel the same way, but you have to ask: Which is more likely to burn
down, the whole networking infrastructure or my house?

~~~
Gormo
Perhaps the OP was using hyperbole: it does seem more likely for reliance on
external infrastructure to be disrupted by something beyond your control than
for your own tools to stop functioning in a way that you can't correct.

There are also other effects of externalizing your tools that don't relate to
continuity of uptime: levels of complexity, adaptability, security, and
manageability of change all have different values for web-based and desktop
software.

------
rwmj
Where is the analysis of how people already use email and how it fails? How is
this going to improve the experience?

There are a ton of research areas for email/messaging, such as those below.
This seems to address none of them.

\- better searching

\- multiple sources (email, SMS, RSS, twitter .. in one place)

\- automatic classification of incoming email, flagging important items,
separating personal and business etc

\- integrating to-do lists

~~~
jorangreef
I am working on a web-based email client (<https://ronomon.com>) with offline
access, instant boot, constant time search, and support for roughly four
million emails. It takes some new approaches to threading, meta-discussions,
multiple sources, attachments, and simple non-structured text to-do lists, and
re-imagines the email client as a multiplayer rather than single-player tool.
Could I let you know when it's ready?

~~~
mike-cardwell
Please let me know when this is ready. My contact details are in my profile. I
love trying to break stuff like this, and I've managed to break lots of
webmail and email clients in the past.

~~~
jorangreef
Thanks Mike, challenge accepted.

------
TeMPOraL
While I think that the video would use a change in voice-over (something more
clear and more emotional), there was something touching that moved me near the
end and made me think about people and simple, day-to-day life. Maybe it's the
sountrack. Anyway, well done :).

~~~
michael_dorfman
The soundtrack is "Ágætis Byrjun" by Sigur Rós-- I'm not sure how they'd feel
about their stuff being used in a commercial setting.

~~~
socksy
Apparently not necessarily well: <http://www.sigur-ros.co.uk/media/homage-or-
fromage.php>

They might be wise to change the music.

------
hm2k
Their homepage is all image, no substance.

I'm guessing their product is the same.

------
fingerprinter
I like what he is saying and what they are showing, but email and particularly
this type of email client will be all about the small touches. I just can't
get a sense for something like this until I feel it for myself.

------
iaskwhy
I think a lot about this since email clients still seem like something done by
a developer without wasting much time thinking about the user experience. For
instance, I'd say most personal email conversations are between only two
people and yet we still can't see it as the usual chat view which is much more
easier to read, like shown on the video and the screenshots.

Please do it and keep improving it as there's a lot of potencial here. Good
work!

------
threepointone
Sigur Ros for the soundtrack? Nicely done!

------
pnathan
it's about time new views were tossed around about email.

Every email client I've used looks like a clone from Netscape Communicator.

~~~
IanDrake
So true. I'm surprised at the level of indignation in the comments here. I
think there's room to make email better for different groups of users and I
think this might be a good start.

------
knowtheory
So... they've turned email into Facebook? Is that the idea? :P

~~~
farlington
I think it's a great idea. Don't most people you know use facebook instead of
email for personal correspondence?

~~~
knowtheory
no?

For one i loathe Facebook's interface. But by and large nearly all of my
communication is by instant messenger, skype, email, phone, or some
combination of the above.

And I basically live online since i work in a distributed team.

~~~
farlington
That's cool. I use many different means to communicate too, mostly for work.

But my friends and family members? For personal messages, like stuff that
really matters, they send messages on facebook. My brothers, my sister, my
mom, my dad—I can't remember the last time any of them emailed me anything.
Maybe a travel itinerary. It could be that my experience, or the experience of
my friends/family, is atypical, but I think there are a lot of people—tens or
hundreds of millions—who use facebook that way, as their primary communication
tool.

------
mahrain
Finally a client that merges / blurs the line between my email conversations
and my IM conversations. I like to have a Skype open as a continuous
conversation with people, like a link dump or easy way to share files. This
seems to do the same for email. Great.

------
soofaloofa
Auto playing the video is a complete turn-off for me.

------
shimonamit
Aside question: Can anyone elaborate a little bit on the camera, lenses, and
graphical effects used to produce the blur/focus effect in this video?

~~~
tincholio
I don't know how they did it, but it could have been easily done with a DSLR
with video capabilities and a decent fast lens. Note that the camera was
mostly static, except for example when doing minute panning movements (not too
smooth, so probably they didn't have the right type tripod head) towards the
right and shifting focus so as to put the viewer's attention on the different
icons.

~~~
shimonamit
Ah, thanks. So most if not all the smarts were in the camera, not in the post-
shooting graphic polish?

~~~
marksu
Simulated Depth of Field on flat surfaces like this can easily be made in post
production using After Effects for example. Here is an old tutorial I found
<http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/2d_depth_of_field/>

You could probably add even more flair by using a 3d camera in AE with DOF
enabled, I've done this before and it can look really slick if used well.

------
smickie
Attachment view is one innovation that stands out, abstracting attachments
from emails to allow independent file-system like browsing of them would be
great.

This client might be a little late to the party in terms of clean UI as
something new, what with Mail 5 coming out soon, Sparrow (assuming your a
desktop mail kind of person).

On a side note, that whole webpage as an image is making my skin crawl.

------
grgg
The "minimalistic" email compose window will baffle and annoy anyone not in
the "focus mode" Lifehack community. It does not look user friendly at all. To
my knowledge, writing email in a window with a subject field and a send button
was not causing anyone friction. I don't think the world is ready or looking
for windows with unlabeled fields and hidden buttons.

------
frazerb
I used NEO from Caelo (nelsons email organiser) for five years+ [[ employer
INSISTED on using freakin' Msft and Outlook ]]. NEO is an overlay (non-
invasive) on top of Outlook that does all this and more - free text search
etc. NEO saved me an hour a week at least. [[ No personal relationship with
Caelo I just think NEO is awesome. ]]

------
adamtulinius
It is weird how replying on the conversations tab makes the user write the
reply above the original message.

------
karolist
Looks cool and polished. Email client space is heating up, I wonder how this
will fare against sparrow.

By the way, does anyone know how the DOF effect in the video is achieved?
Guess it was added during post processing in software.

~~~
xelfer
I'm guessing it was filmed with a Digital SLR with a high aperture lens,
something like a 50mm 1.4 or 1.8 (doesn't look shallow enough for a 1.2).

~~~
evilswan
Agree, looks about 1.4 fully-open.

------
steffoz
definitely interesting the distraction free sending email dialog!

------
brown9-2
I must be one of the only people out there who thinks that the experience of
sending/receiving emails in Gmail and/or Outlook is just fine today, thanks.

------
jessedhillon
A person could (easily?) build this using context.io (<http://context.io>)

------
chrischen
Turn this into a web interface, allow some emails to be retrieved by the
public, and you've got another facebook clone!

------
MaysonL
So, is this merely a design fiction, or are there plans for this to actually
exist and be available somewhere?

------
webmonkeyuk
Sorry, I fell asleep somewhere about 10 seconds into the video when the dreary
voice and dreamy music started

------
mbrzuzy
I couldn't really tell much about it with all the images being shown from a
side perspective.

------
akrymski
Interesting demo video. We've actually built something along those lines:
www.post.fm

------
rglover
Why isn't this being developed? The design looks great, but like many are
saying...a concept is only the halfway point. The video sold me, but it'd be
nice if I could at least sign up for a beta invite or something. Seeing
"concept" all over the page left me a bit hopeless of ever using the product.

------
ssn
Is this being developed?

I think that there are some original and interesting ideas in there.

------
kefs
autoplay? :(

~~~
brown9-2
I'd love to see the results of an A/B test to see how people respond to
autoplaying videos. Seems like a big turn-off.

------
tluyben2
WHAT IS THAT MUSIC? :( I just stuck a fork in my ear!! Thanks man. Or, in
other words, if you make a video, don't distract people by giving them suicide
feelings!

------
dreww
i think this is intended to be, and will always remain, vaporware.

or perhaps i misunderstand what is meant by "concept".

