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The Email Inquisition (Published Sun, 17 Feb 2008 02:47:00 GMT)

I am, and have for some time been, a Thunderbird user. And while it has met most of my needs for an email client, I have been relying less and less on it for communicating. Instead, IM clients and things like Facebook messaging have been taking over for me. I thought it was a problem with the set of standards and protocols that make up email itself, but after a few conversations with David Ascher and spending some time thinking of messaging in general, I think I’ve changed my mind.

In the past decade and a half of using email, I can’t think of any feature other than spam filtering that has made a significant impact on my experience. This is probably why web-based email clients continue to grow in popularity as they close the functionality gap with the rich-client variety. Some people might think that rich clients such as Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird should see the writing on the wall. I don’t—I think that Thunderbird should fight back and do some of the things that a server-side solution just can’t reasonably scale to.

I was out for lunch with David the other day. Succinctly, David is the man who has been tasked with “fixing email”. I often like to ask David questions about what he’s got in mind for Thunderbird. He always has some very interesting and insightful things to say, which is probably how he found himself in his current position at Mozilla. One thing that came up was a sort of question parser for messages. If done correctly, when replying to an email it could find all of the questions asked. This could serve as a to-do list when replying. You could also be presented with things like “all unanswered questions from your boss”.

I took a little crack at it as sort of a proof of concept. The code written in ruby isn’t worth examining too closely, but it is available here. My approach is very crude, especially when you consider that Thunderbird is localized to 34 different locales, but I still find the results interesting. My girlfriend and I had our first exchanges through email, so I pointed it at an IMAP folder with the first eleven emails she sent me and here are the results:

Do you do lots of fun writing?
What do you do at work?
Where in Ontario are you from?
What brought you to Van?
Are you home watching movies today?
Are you a downtown kid too?
And you skate in from kits?
I'm off at 4:30 most days, so how about Monday?
Do you have a plan?
You're somewhere near Hastings & Granville, aren't you?

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