User-Visible Goals for Next-Generation Email

This is a collection of user-visible goals for a hypothetical redesign of the Internet Mail system. These have been collected from the mail-ng mailing list and edited a bit by me. I've tried to attribute all of the suggestions by linking them to the list archive.

The purpose of this effort is to try to understand what users would want in an email system and what might motiviate them to deploy a new system.

Caveats:

1. Users have widely varying wants/needs; some users' needs may be important even if the average user doesn't share those needs.
2. Even a single user can have contradictory wants/needs (sometimes without realizing this). Large groups of users certainly do. At this stage it makes more sense to be explicit about the (apparent or real) contradictions than to try to resolve them.
3. Since we're talking about goals of human users here, it follows that most of these goals pertain to using email for communication between humans, or between humans and machines. That doesn't mean that mail-ng shouldn't try to deal with machine-to-machine communications. At some point there will need to be a decision about the proper scope for mail-ng, but we haven't had that discussion yet.

With those in mind, here's a stab at it:

Undesirable Content (e.g. Spam and Viruses)

• Users want to be able to read mail without seeing a significant amount of spam. (To a recipient, "spam" is basically anything that the recipient doesn't like that was sent by anyone except a person known personally to the recpient) [00222]
• Users want to be able to send messages to large number of people at low cost. (yes, this includes spammers, but it also includes mailing lists). [00222]
• Spammers want to be able to send messages to every email user on the network. [00367]
  (Note: Spammers are users too. While it's easy to dismiss spammers' needs as not being legitimate, this is over-simplistic. Anyway, I'd rather make this desire of users explicit than to implicitly assume that spam is never legitimate, or that there aren't any legitimate reasons to send out large numbers of messages.)
• Users want to be able to read mail without exposing their computers to viruses or worms. [00222]

• Users want to be able to control who can send them messages. [00224]
• Users want to be able receive mail from people they don't know. [00284]
• Most users want to receive all mail except spam and maybe a few blacklisted people. [00286]
• Users want to be able to refuse all mail from anyone they don't know. [00349]
• A few users (e g some famous people) want to receive mail only from trusted people. [00286]
• Some users want to check if message would be delivered, such as if [the recipient's] email address exists at all and if they want to accept such message even before attempting to send the message. [00224]
• Users want to be able to divulge an email address to a specific party without running the risk of receiving mail from everyone that party may choose to share the address with. [00365]
• Users want to be able to revoke the right of specific senders after granting them the rights to send. For example, un-subscribing from a mailing list should not depend on the mailing list manager honouring the remove request; it should be a unilateral action on the part of the recipient. [00365]

• Users want to be able to exchange messages without risk of the contents of those messages being exposed to others. [00222]
• Recipients want to be able to read mail without the senders of messages knowing that they've read their mail. [00222] (see also [00367])
• (some) Users want to (occasionally) be able to send mail anonymously. [00222]

• Users want messages delivered ASAP. [00240]
• Users want to be notified immediately when they have new mail without having to activily check for it continously. [00371]
• Users are particularly keen to have almost instantaneous delivery of short messages where possible (for IM like applications) [00240]
• Users want fast access to their mail. They do not want to be delayed by the downloading of N megabytes of unwanted data (like a load of viruses). This is particularly so for those who are still on dial-up access. Those who are bandwidth-billed also do not want their expensive bandwidth wasted. They do not want other people to be able to mailbomb them or DDoS them with mail. [00309]

• Users want mail to work reliably - meaning that if they send a message that message will get there in a timely fashion unless there is some "valid" reason that the message could not be delivered. To a user, a "valid" reason is something like "there is nobody at this address" or maybe something like "the message is too big" but NOT something outside the user's ability to understand or control like "DNS lookup failure" or "MTA congestion" or "data format conversion error". [00222]
• Users want to be able to tell whether a message has been delivered. [00222]
• Senders want to be able to request receipt notification and be notified if/when the message was received. [00222]
• Senders (including spammers) sometimes want "disposition notification", which informs them that the message has been displayed to the recipient. (Spammers are known to use "web bugs" in HTML email to achieve this effect.) [00367]
• Some users want to be able to determine how they receive the message (traceability). [00224]
• Users want to know what happened to messages in transit. [00371]
• Users want to know the life history of a message for policy/filtering/... decisions as well as to trace problems. [00377]
• Users want more consistent error/bounce/reject messages so that they can easily sort/process them. [00375]

• Users want to be sure that mail they send is delivered unaltered. [00371]
• Users want to receive messages unaltered. [00371]

• Recipients want to be able to reliably determine who sent a message (especially if the message was sent by someone known to the recipient, or if the message was sent by someone who is well-known, or if the message was sent by someone associated with a well-known organization). [00222]
• Users want to be able to make sure they are the only ones who can use their email address (no spoofing). [00224]
• Users want to know that the person sending mail to them is who they purport to be. [00352]
• Users want to know that the person they're exchanging mail with is who they think it is. [00353]

• Users want to know which messages are in response to which and what discussions they form part of. [00240]
• Users want to make sure its clear how their email address got to the sender and why they are sending the message without reading the entire message. [00224]
• Users want replies to go to "the right place" without thinking about it. "The right place" depends on the content of the reply and cannot be determined reliably by looking only at the message being replied to. [00232] (see also [00278])
• Users want to see quotes of other messages. [00371]
• Users don't want to download quotes of other messages. [00371]
• Users want to be certain that quotes of other messages are authentic. [00371]
• Users want quotes of other messages to be suppressed or displayed in a particular format. [00371]
• Users want the ability for a sender to inform a recipient that a previous message has been revised by a new replacing message. The recipient can after that choose to see the previous or the new version of such a message. [suggested by Jacob Palme in private mail]

• Users want copies of their [sent] mail to be kept. [00371]
• Users don't want copies of stuff that's already sitting elsewhere to be added to their mail copy store. [00371]
• Users want to be able to keep their mail organised into folders. [00370]
• Users want access to their mail folders from anywhere on the internet. [00370]
• Users don't want anyone else to access their mail folders. [00370]
• Users want to be able to search their mail folders. [00370]
• Users want to be able to automatically file mail into incoming folders. [00370]
• Users want to share some of their mail folders with other users (which looked at from the right angle makes mail transport redundant...) [00370]
• Users want to be able to request copies of messages that they know exist but don't have (accidentally deleted, older message when new to mailinglist). [00371]
• [Users want] the ability to link emails and mail boxes in a more flexible way than a tree structure. [00373].
  Some examples I think are relevant:
  • Someone with separate tasks/jobs want to have a folder structure where there is one "meeting" folder for each task/job, and a general "meeting" folder which is the aggregate of all "meeting" folders of the user.
  • Someone receiving an email which has a content that suggests it fits into more than one folder should be able to view the email in each of them. This can greatly reduce the time to find an old, but important message which addresses several different issues.
• Users want to (at least seemingly) alter received messages to help them organizing their messages (e.g. (seemingly, at least) change subject so that they can find related messages quickly, even if they came in with unrelated subjects. [00377]
• Users want to trace that all incoming mails have been answered or have explicitly been flagged as not needing an answer. [00374]
• Several human users want to use the same mailbox, with all or more than one of them looking at all mail. [00374]
• Several human users want to use the same mailbox, with at least one of them looking at each mail. [00374]
• Individual users of a combined mailbox want to be able to reply in person (while still having the re-reply go to the mailbox) or on behalf of the mailbox. [00374]

• Users want to be able to exchange mail in any language that they can read and write. [00222]
• Users want to be able communicate effectively in their own language without having to learn English. [00352]
• Users want to be able to spell their own email addresses in their native languages. [00222]
• Users want their email addresses to be memorable and transcribable by recipients (who may use a language other than the sender's native language). [00222]
• Users want to be able to exchange documents in native format. [00222]
• Users want to be able to exchange messages without worrying about whether the recipient can read the data format used in the message. [00222]
• Users want automated format and maybe even language conversion where appropriate. [00371]

• Users want to be able to access their email via a variety of devices (desktops, webmail, PDAs, mobile phones, ???). [00222]
• Some users want to be able to access other messaging systems (voicemail, fax) using email tools. [00222]
• Users want to be able to access their mail from a variety of locations (Derived from [00366] as best I understand it)
• Users want to be able to read and answer mail when not connected to the network (Derived from [00366] as best I understand it)

• Users want to be able to easily, correctly, and confidently configure the tools that they use to read and send mail (as well as any other parameters that they need to configure for mail to work well). [00222] (See also [00289])

• Users want to be able to recall messages that have been sent but not yet read. [00222]
• Users want to be able to send messages that will be disappear if not read before some interval (expiration). [00222]
• Users don't want all kinds of mail programs to insert their life history into messages leading to excessive headers. [00371]
• Recipients don't want to receive duplicate copies of messages, even if they arrived over multiple paths. Senders don't want to have to remember who is on which mailing lists. [00232]
• Users want a uniform interface to mailing lists. [00232]
• Users want both their and other people's absence/vacation messages to go to the right place (e.g. original sender of a mail rather than a whole mailing list). [00378]