Email clients haven't moved forward since the mid-1990s. Most applications have added superficial features, but the basics remained unchanged: Folders, lists of disconnected emails sorted by arrival time. Clients have no sense of priority, urgency, workflows, or connectedness. Their search features are simple and are sometimes painfully slow. Users today are bombarded with email and find popular email clients hard to use and inefficient. How did we get here? How do we get out of it? This talk will show new ideas of improving the email experience for overloaded users. Gabor will also talk about commercial opportunities in this field, illustrated with his own experience in Silicon Valley at his previous startup, Xobni, the maker of a popular Outlook-based application. These are the slides from Gabor Cselle's presentation at CSIRO / Macquarie University on Oct 15, 2008. Thanks to Andrew Lampert for organizing the talk!

1. The Future of Email Gabor Cselle October 15, 2008 CSIRO / Macquarie

4. ISN’T EMAIL SOLVED?

5. Email volumes are rising … Billions of non-spam messages sent per day “ In 2008, average business user sent or received 156 messages / day.” Source: Radicati Group [1]

6. Emails Clients haven’t Changed

7. The 400M Pound Gorilla

9. PROBLEMS

13. Three Big Problems in Email Prioritize Organize and Search Multiplex Emails have different levels of importance, urgency. But email clients treat every email the same. Folders are not a natural way to organize emails. In today’s implementations, search is badly done. Pull in and synthesize information from various sources other than email. Make email universally accessible.

14. PRIORITY

15. My Inbox …

16. … Actually Important

17. Important vs. Urgent “ Your Amazon order has shipped” “ Please review the board slides this week” Not Urgent “ Guys, there’s cake at my desk” “ The servers are down” Urgent Not Important Important

20. ORGANIZE & SEARCH

21. Coping with Folders Source: [6] Cheap but messy Search only No effort to delete or file email No filers Takes some effort, temporary mess Intermittent clean-ups Spring Cleaners High mental burden, stress Daily passes to file or delete email Frequent filers

27. This Reminds me of …

29. MULTIPLEX

30. Many Sources of Data EMail SMS Blogs Twitter Facebook Unified communications

31. A Multiplexed Feed Twitter Email Blog entry

32. CONCLUSIONS

34. REFERENCES

36. QUESTIONS? [email_address] www.gaborcselle.com