Mail-ee: Task Oriented Email

Background
Today, e-mail is important for communication and it is ubiquitous in the workplace. Vital to the way that people work is the ability to organize tasks. Currently, there are a few ways of doing this. One can use text editors to create lists or keep relevant emails. In this project, I intend to combine these two methods of keeping track of tasks, but first it would help to go into some of the history.

IMAP e-mail servers sometimes allow for plug-ins. This is true of various version of Webmail. A lot of email services, such as Hotmail and GMail, do not support plug-ins in their email environments. A way around this is to use software like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird. These are programs that allow a user to check various email accounts through one portal. Both Outlook and Thunderbird allow plug-ins. Thunderbird allows them outright—many of the plug-ins are made by savvy programmers and redistributed through Mozilla. Outlook can be modified, but it takes more programming and also requires hacks to the system.

The use of plug-ins is important because it may be possible, through plug-ins, to create an environment where emails can be handled in a different way than open-read-delete. The purpose of this project is to think about how to create a new interaction with e-mail, specifically involving the creation of to-do lists from email.

The Approach
The approach to this problem involves figuring out a way to make an assistant and a way to send emails to this assistant. By reading an email, the knowledge is gained by the user. The retention of the information messages should be retained in the assistant, however. The problem then becomes the issue of how to get the assistant to know which messages to send to the to-do list.

Although a computer may eventually be able to figure out which messages are important, ultimately it is the user who knows what is important to him or her. The easiest way to do this, I suspect, is for the user to have a folder in each email account labeled ‘to-do’. The name of these folders is understood by the assistant so that when a message is sent by the user to a ‘to-do’ folder, the assistant detects this and updates the to-do list.

Removing items from a list is just as important as adding an item. For this, each email account would also need a folder labeled ‘done’. When a task is done, the user should be able to tell the assistant that the item is done and the assistant should take steps to remove the item off the list. This would most likely involve moving messages from the ‘to-do’ folder and into the ‘done’ folder.

With advanced programming skills, implementing a system like this is very feasible. A program like Thunderbird would be able to easily implement a plug-in like this. A similar program may even be able to use it as a feature, rather than just as a plug-in.