The future of e-mail could be open source
E-mail is no longer about channeling conversations between people, as Alistair Croll suggests. Instead, it has become a record of what we do online and, as such, our in-box must fundamentally change or face extinction.
It's a provocative argument. I suspect that it's also true.
Croll writes:
Today, I have to visit dozens of other sites and services to make sense of my online life. This is a waste: I already have a record of all these transactions in my in-box. I just need a better way to look at them.
Gmail offered a tantalizing glimpse of what in-boxes could be, but it stopped short of recognizing this shift from conversations to a digital record of our online lives. The in-box of the future looks more like log file analysis and aggregation, and less like an e-mail platform.
Amen. I've actually been wondering for years why an e-commerce company hasn't arisen from analysis of the in-box: to know where I'm going, what I want to buy (and what I have bought), and more, all a company would need is a glimpse into my in-box. For real value, I'd give that access in a heartbeat.
Appetizingly, Microsoft is unlikely to be able to transform e-mail with Outlook and the Exchange Server: it is already too deep into its Innovator's Dilemma investment in the old world of e-mail. Plus, its Outlook/Exchange architecture is too calcified to dramatically shift e-mail's focus.
Google could do it with Gmail, or Yahoo could with Zimbra and Yahoo Mail. Done right, I'd put my money on Yahoo or some other open-source e-mail offering because this sort of thing is tailor-made for the community efforts of open source. Let one company or community create the core, and then invite an add-on community to build around it.
Maybe Mozilla should be doing this with Thunderbird? Certainly, someone should.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Question is - can any of this be solved by simply changing the user interface and its layout, with perhaps a small internal search engine or database of sorts doing the grunt work of rpesenting the info in a way that makes sense?
Heard this on the way into work this morning on "The Hopkinson Report" Podcast (available on iTunes - Episode 51 with Josh Baer (i'm a couple of weeks behind). Sounds like it already does what's being requested here.
Ian W.
If you Google-define IAAP, you'll find that acronym also belongs to the "International Association for Analytical Psychology."
Kinda fits -- don't it?
Seriously, the old email protocols will need to be replaced to achieve this goal. It would require more than just a simple add-on to Thunderbird.
http://www.rimarts.co.jp/becky.htm
It is not an open source software, but it has the feature that you talked about.
Plus, if some on-line mail service want to look into my mailbox and tell me about it, I shall drop it immediately. How terrible is that! You may never know what will pop up from your personal history.
With OtherInbox, we do use an algorithm to search through your Inbox but it only looks for automated messages from your shopping and social networking sites, not personal emails with friends or coworkers. Then we're very careful to make sure that you are always informed and in control of how the information is used.
What do we do with the messages we find? We automatically organized them into folders for you, we scan for Fedex deliveries or eBay auctions that we can put on your calendar, and soon we'll organize your receipts and offer ways to save money.
They provide Mail, UMS (voicemail, SIP, fax, sms...) as well as a standard office in one interface. So imagine Google Reader, Google Voice, Google Mail, Google Calendar, Google Apps as well as Google Docs on one site. Plus FAX and webbased SIP telephony ...
Joshua Baer
Founder of OtherInbox
http://oib.com
- by Pank2008 June 11, 2009 8:05 AM PDT
- As HyperOffice argued in a recent whitepaper which was covered by ZDNet, the answer to a lot of email problems is not to get more power out of email, but to STOP using email for collaborative purposes. The "push" mode of email is simply not efficient for group work. The recent launch of Google's Wave product is also indicative of companies starting to unshackle themselves from the "email mode" we have gotten ourselves in after decades of using the tool. You can check the HyperOffice whitepaper @ http://www.hyperoffice.com/business-email-overload/
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