22May / 2008

Standard8 has your name

Obviously after kicking so much ass there was nothing left for mr. banner to do but take names.

What used to be an awkward set of instructions is about to become as simple as a checkbox.

And yes this isn’t quite the feature that gets everyone laid (hopefully at least a couple people get laid). But it’s an excellent intermediary step toward getting some more testing on the Mac OS X System Address Book connection that should be available in the next alpha. Likely in a month or so when Mark is done with your name he will have replaced this system with an even better experience.

What is the connection experience?

It’s well beyond time to be thinking about what it means to have the OS X Address Book connected to Thunderbird. There’s a long road ahead. What is the end game here?

Should all contacts be stored in the System Address Book or the Thunderbird Address Book? Would that kind of change mean something for Windows? What would that mean for Linux?

If we want to sync your contacts with your iPhone or other iAppleDevices then we should be storing our data in the OS X Address Book, however we should also be careful of another systems limitations.

I like to think of the future of the Thunderbird address book as providing an overlay on top of other address book systems like the OS X System Address Book or an LDAP type address book. We want our data to be compatible with those different basic remote and local storage services. However we also want to do more interesting things with your contacts than what most LDAP systems offer.

If I were to steal the look and feel of GNOME Mobile platform diagram (which I like a lot) it might come out looking something like this for the Thunderbird Address Book Overlay. Underneath is a system address book, ldap, or local thunderbird address book providing the basics of storage. Then above that layer is where we can begin doing interesting things with your Thunderbird Address Book. Going beyond just emails and names and perhaps linking with different kinds of accounts your friends have.

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21May / 2008

You had me at hello

I spent some time on Friday and Monday writing a script to do some analysis of the Enron Email Dataset. I’m working on a new type of message list view for thunderbird, well a whole new layout actually, but for the message view I wanted to have an idea of message size and content.

Email Data

It turns out that decent email data is relatively hard to come by. Because of privacy concerns it’s nearly impossible to have access to a companies email where you can see the full exchange between a number of different people. Luckily the Enron dataset has become publicly available exactly for this kind of research into email problems.

The enron dataset is broken down into directories for many of the people involved and sub-directories of their emails.

maildir
- taylor-m
  - all_documents
  - archive
  - australia_trading
  - boat
  - brazil_trading
  - …
- mclaughlin-e
  - all_documents
  - calendar
  - contacts
  - deleted_items
  - discussion_threads
  - …
- …

The script I wrote is designed to read in email files in the directory and analyze the message body for its content. Then is spurts out the numbers with median and averages computed.

Mail Trends

If you’ve seen Mail Trends, you know that Mihai Parparita analyzed the enron emails for time, size, threading, and people comparisons. If you download the code you can run it against your own email and will likely see some amazing results (someone should pull this into Thunderbird!).

However the information I was looking for was not available in the mail trends analysis. Mail trends analyzes only email headers to create relationship statistics between emails. And while it does have the size of messages in terms of KB I was looking for the size of message in terms of the number of words.

You had me at Hello?

I’ve had this hypothesis or assumption that within the first 2 sentences of an email I can tell what it’s going to be about without reading the rest. Please try this out on your own! Read the first two sentences of any email and take a second to think if you can at least prioritize your response required for the message.

Combine this assumption with the my other assumption that it’s more important for me to process my mails than it is for me to actually read the entirety of any message. I know people are probably thinking, “you should read the whole message”; but in all honesty more than half the messages I get aren’t important to me at all so reading them would just waste time. This second part of my hypothesis stems from ideas like Inbox Zero and GTD where processing all those “things” is the most important part to being productive.

45 is Median Number of Words Per Message

Analyzing all those emails gave a bit of a statistics problem. On average it turned out to be something like 120 words per message. This high average number came from a few outliers of 500+ word messages that were skewing the results towards the high end, when the numbers should really be reflecting the low end where more results were present. So on average the median number of words per email message was 45. That’s the average of all the medians… rounded. Probably should have just included the standard deviation and called it quits.

I didn’t analyze the kinds of words or their length, which would be something else that’s pretty interesting to know. A next step could be to simply analyze the number of characters per message, that could give interesting hints on how to display the message in it’s entirety.

Back to the Message List View

Here’s a rough breakdown of what GMail gives me when I look at any given message. It’s just enough to understand who this message is from and what it’s probably about.

It’s possible with the [x] checkbox and the actions menu that I could process this mail and move on. However usually I end up opening every message to make sure there’s nothing else I should see. I’m not sure if that’s because I really need to read the rest of the message or what.

So my question continues to be this: Given a little bit more of the message itself, or a little bit more of the context of the message… is there a better way for me to process my emails? I have some mockups and ideas on how I think it could be done, but they need more refining. Will post soon.

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21May / 2008

Some Signature Updates

Some news for the Thunderbird signatures in email. I’ve updated the Message Signatures wiki page with some new possible directions.

Signature Manager

One still missing piece has been adding a signature manager. Previously I mentioned that we could create a new dialog window for managing signatures, however several comments posted and emailed made me want to look into other possibilities.

So here’s a mockup of a possible layout for the Signature manager to be in the Thunderbird preferences, under the Composition tab. (tabs within tabs… whoo hoo!)

Script Signatures

I keep offering a possible script signature in different mockups and yet there hasn’t been any mention of how you’d add a script signature yourself. My feeling is that we can leave script signatures up to extensions and extension developers. It might be nice to offer a script signature by default and perhaps this would lead more people to try out extensions that provide script signatures, however I don’t have a plan to create a default interface for them yet.

Signature Add-ons

Here’s a pretty simple way to introduce signature add-ons specifically to the signature preferences. There are some open ended pieces of this that need to be worked out. What does the add-on manager look like when it opens up from a link like this?

Your comments and suggestions are appreciated as always.

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20May / 2008

Tabulation

Lately I’ve been asking a lot of different people, “Why do you use tabs?”, in reference to tabbed web browsers. I wanted to do some quick and dirty research on the design and usage behind tabs; some of this is obvious yet it helps to have it written out.

So here’s a bit of what I’ve found people claim to use tabs for. I’ve arranged the information into what I felt were 4 distinct types of usage. I’d love to hear about other usage that doesn’t fit into these categories or other categories people have observed.

Defer Action

Often people want to defer an action until a later time. In a web browser they will open a link in tab that they’d like to read a little bit later. This was reported to occur on news or information sites where a person is reading a single page but wants to branch off to other links after reading. After completing the tab in their current focus the person would begin processing the other tabs lined up for later.

Lightweight Bookmark

Similar to deferring an action, people mentioned that tabs were a way of keeping certain pages around for an indefinite period of time. These pages weren’t necessarily going to be processed right away but they didn’t want to be lost. When asked if they bookmarked these page people responded that these pages were transitive reference type pages (i.e. they needed them to continuously use them for a certain project) and so tabbing seemed to be a way to bookmark things in a lightweight fashion. This especially made sense when tabs are saved within a session; people reported opening lots of tabs (hundreds) and then closing Firefox down completely only to reopen them all later.

Collect Related Information

Many people cited using tabs specifically to collect information on the same subject. Often this kind of collection was research for a composition like a blog post. Some people claimed to do this in a very formal fashion of opening up a fresh window for a blog post and then creating new tabs in that window for research related to the blog post. While others referenced doing an important activity in one window and having a set of windows with tabs in them for researching ideas around that important activity. This type of collection is similar to the lightweight bookmark except that most of the tabs were intended for a very finite period of time such as using the page to link to.

Switch Context and Keep Current State

Many people also talked about how they would “Adventure off” into other tabs to follow something that was either more important or more interesting but they really wanted to keep their exact place they were. This is very similar to the defer action, you could say this is the after state of the defer action. The only difference here is that the person is intentionally keeping the first tab around in it’s exact state where the defer might lead to closing tabs as they are finished. A common example was a quick interruption that called for searching for something unrelated to what they were doing. People would open a new tab, complete their search and then close that tab to go back to what they were doing.

Some Related Links for you to open up in Tabs

What does this mean for Thunderbird?

This information isn’t for figuring out how tabs work in firefox and then squeezing that idea into thunderbird. It is merely here to create a common language reference for talking about tabs and their usage. Hopefully people could see new ideas on how tabs can be used from understanding how they are used in other contexts. There currently exists an implementation of tabs in Thunderbird but it will not be the same as it is now by the 3.0 release.

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16May / 2008

War Plan Red

Dear friendly neighbors to the north. Only Defence Scheme No.1 can save you now for I will soon be en route.

A Great Invention

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ranks Poutine as #10 in The 50 Greatest Canadian Inventions, impressive. And I intend to eat a lot of poutine while I’m up in Montreal this weekend. In fact I hope to stop at Au Pied de Cochon for their famous varieties.

hopefully I’ll see this sweatshirt that I can’t seem to find anywhere

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14May / 2008

Signatures in Email

Last week I was blitzed by being cc’d on a lot of email signature related bugs. To remain calm and keep delusions of control active I started on a wiki page for Message Signatures in Thunderbird. Right now the page contains lots of links to relevant areas and ascii art mockups for choosing a default signature for accounts; it’s meant to collect thoughts, research, and define direction.

Managing Signatures

I think a general improvement plan will involve simplifying the signature selection and creation process. Here are a number of points that I think can improve the current aspects of signature management.

Each account is created a default signature (from the person’s name and organization)
Every signature can be edited with a built-in signature editor (created from the compose window)
Signatures can be imported from files, but are saved in the Thunderbird profile or preferences (see bug 324495)
A separate dialog is used for managing all signatures, with import, add, edit, remove actions as well as a link to see the signature extensions available from AMO.

Concept Mockup of Signature Chooser in Account Settings

Using Signatures

In the relevant extensions section of the wiki page I tried to list most of the extensions that are dealing with how to use signatures in the compose window. There are a number of ways of solving this problem and lots of issues surrounding posting style that I am hesitant to battle with.

Several bugs (see bug 219197, bug 73567, and bug 37644) have suggestions that attack the problem from different angles. New comments and suggestions are welcome!

ASCII Art Side Note

I think I’ve started to use Johan’s ASCII Art Mockup post as a reference for my own ascii art; it’s good to see some style written down somewhere.

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13May / 2008

A bit of a Communication Problem

I’ve been doing some testing recently with Thunderbird and its offline support; trying to get a handle on what the state of the onion is. One problem that has bothered me is the silent state of online to offline, not to mention the dialogs that happen after that.

Communication

How do you convey that Thunderbird is offline or online? I’m not too sure of the implementation yet but I think we can get some excellent ideas when examining IM clients and how they handle online vs. offline; for email it’s just a little less extreme.

Online

Should have some indication that is available, but not too prominent because this is the state where everything is good. When you’re online, emails will be sent right away and new messages will arrive, we don’t need a large piece of real estate to inform you that the situation is normal.

Simple and obvious green signal that you’re online

Offline

Requires a clear indication that is prominent and obvious. Auto-reconnection should be the default and timeouts created that indicate when the next reconnect will take place; allow people to interrupt and reconnect immediately.

You’re grey and offline, do you want to try going online now? I’ll try in a little bit anyway…

Because for email we can also expect that some people will want to be offline intentionally we need to allow for people to remove the indication and include ways for people to tell Thunderbird to stop trying to auto-reconnect.

Getting Back Online

When you’ve finally reconnected it’s a moment for celebration… Yay! Get back to work!! This kind of notification allows people to understand that you’ve reconnected and things will be back to normal.

Getting back online from an offline state can also incur some syncing and likely heavy network traffic so for those reasons alone it’s good to let people know that Thunderbird has realized the new online state and is going to start doing it’s business again. Hold on to your butts…

Woo Hoo! We’re back online!

Some Caveats

We examined an IM client with a single account. There are some extra things about Thunderbird and email that need to be considered, here’s just one: You could have multiple email accounts and only a few are not connecting. What does it look like to have the account you’re focused on online and another account offline? What does the opposite look like?

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13May / 2008

Auto-Complete on Subjects

To make an initial start on our new search aspirations we need to begin testing and trying out some of our improved searching ideas.

Quick Search

Our first step in this direction is to add an auto-complete on subjects in the Quick Search entry. It’s important to get a lot of feedback on our search improvements so integrating our improvements with the current search is paramount. New behaviors need to be pushed out during our alpha releases to gain visibility and testing. This improvement doesn’t alter the current search behavior at all, everything is planned to act in parallel.

What will change?

The quick search will try to help you find message subjects by auto-completing on the subject name. The subjects it offers for auto-complete are searched from the available subjects in the folder Thunderbird displays in the current view.

For Example:

Type in the name “address” into the quick search entry
The auto-complete will give a list that match the word “address” somewhere in the subject
Selecting an item in the list will complete the whole subject name and search the message view for that name

Lo-fi mockup of Quick Search Auto-Complete on Subject

The auto-complete is only planned to work for subjects at the moment. Hopefully we’ll be able to start expanding this soon to include email addresses and names too. Once we have some experience with the auto-complete widget we can start expanding it’s scope a little.

Here’s the current design for the layout of the rich-item widget for matching message subjects.

There are a couple of other tweaks to the {meta} area that need to be improved. The light colors are a little hard to see and it might be better to brighten up the sender names. Also it could be good to add the date the message was sent. Perhaps like this:

$SENDER to $RECIPIENTS $TIME_AGO

ex: Bryan to you,david,gary 3 hours ago

What will stay the same?

The quick search should continue to search only in the current folder / view. This may change sometime in the future, but only when we have a better solution for that problem.

Also it will still work for searches that aren’t subjects, like senders. When you select a different search type, like “to or cc”, then it won’t continue to auto-complete on subjects; only when you select “subject” or “subject or sender” types.

When is this happening?

Everything is up in the air for discussion right now as we work through an incremental design that makes sense. The implementation pieces are going to come together soon when the new toolkit auto-complete widget from firefox is pulled into Thunderbird (see bug 370306 and bug 309081) and we figure out the best strategy for quickly searching a set of subjects from the current view.

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08May / 2008

Searching for a new find

It’s time to start looking into a new search method for Thunderbird. One of the major changes planned for Thunderbird is a new and improve search, but what does that mean?

What do we have?

First lets look at what we have for a search system. At a very simple level most search systems break down into two pieces, a search interface for filtering and a results interface for listing. Thunderbird does this in a couple places.

Quick Search

The quick search entry is always at the top right of the Thunderbird window and allows people to search over the current view. The results of a quick search fill into the current view, replacing whatever listing was previously shown.

The Quick Search defaults to searching only the Subject or Sender and will only search mail that Thunderbird has downloaded already. Messages that are not listed in the current view (like in another folder) will not be searched unless that folder is selected, otherwise a person needs to use the Advanced Search.

Advanced Search

Hidden under the Edit Menu and Find Sub-Menu is an advanced search dialog that can make use of the remote mail or news protocol to perform a full search instead of just a local search. The Search Messages dialog provides it’s own search interface as well as it’s own results view directly below the search. While the Search Messages dialog provides some more advanced search methods over the quick search it’s hard to find and difficult to use effectively.

The Search Messages dialog allows for complex search queries to be built with multiple search terms composed of a number of different field type selectors. The queries require a lot of input from the user because of the tight structure used to create them. The same search and results interface code is used for creating mail filters.

Edit -> Find -> Search Messages…

Advanced Search Dialog

What do we want?

I was lucky enough to chat with Andrew Gilmartin yesterday and he framed a future goal very well. “We’re not looking to make search an added feature box on the side of Thunderbird“, we’re looking to make search the definitive method for viewing mail.

What does “Search as the definitive viewing method for your mail” mean? That’s a good question and I’m not sure exactly what a good answer is yet. A search would help you find the message you’re looking for, and perhaps a search view never lets you lose that message in the first place. There’s a lot to explore.

Here are two important pieces of a search system and view that need to be examined and somehow exposed in the interface.

Search and Filter

An impediment of the current search system is requiring people to choose a search type (Subject or Sender) before they even enter any text. To help people hunt for the correct item you want to allow for starting their search very broad and then allow them to narrow down that broad search with filters like subject or sender.

The current search system has some speed issues that likely prevented a broad to filter system of searching to be implemented. The mail client Mail.app provides a decent filter bar when searching mail that allows people to see what the current filters are (folder, account) and change them.

Browse and Filter

The SEEK extension is an excellent example of how offering a system of browsing mail by grouped attributes from the start can help people find the item or group of items they were looking for. Instead of starting with a search term you give the person a list of attributes they might use to filter the list of messages.

An inspiring system for a similar searching, browsing, and filtering methods is things, you should try it if you haven’t already.

Getting What we Want

Moving towards a new search based paradigm will take some adventurous steps and it’s important not to disturb current usage while making those steps. Here are a number of changes to look at making.

Merging Search Interfaces

Each of the two current search interfaces provide some needed features and capabilities, however having two separate interfaces for searching is confusing and difficult to understand. We need to combine the ability to do a quick search with the ability to perform a full search into a single interface with an improved results view.

With a single search interface Thunderbird will be searching the local and remote mail (like IMAP) at the same time. However local results will be listing quickly and remote results will likely take a little more time. Both sets of results, local and remote, can be merged into the same search results view by showing local results instantly and filling in remote results as they arrive.

Offline Cached and Indexed Mail

In order to have a fast search system even while offline Thunderbird needs to do a much better job of caching and indexing mail as it encounters it. With new messages instantly cached and indexed they can be made available to search queries, filters, and views immediately.

This is an excellent time to start thinking about the data mining mail in a way that helps searching messages later. It’s also time to think about making the defaults tuned towards offline usage while still allowing people to control online / offline caching.

Auto Complete

With mail data indexed locally and quickly available Thunderbird should be able to provide a slick and fun auto-complete on search terms it knows about. Auto complete when searching for items you’re already aware exists helps with miss-spelling errors and more complete matching. The awesomebar shows how with just a little broken memory of a title or url you can easily find the page you saw once before.

Fetching Results

Our current drive is to investigate some indexing on messages (at least subjects), pull the new auto-complete into Thunderbird, and get a search bar using that fancy auto-complete on mail subjects and hopefully the addition of a couple more fun things. Leave some comments or jump on the newsgroup to participate.

A wire frame of a possible mail search auto-complete

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Bryan Clark

Monthly Archives: May 2008