State the issues in entirely non-technical terms. What enhancements
do we seek, in terms that are visible and important to end-users and
to operators? No reference to protocols or formats is permitted.
Talk only in terms of user interactions and operator actions.
That's an excellent idea. 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.
With those in mind, here's a stab at it:
- 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)
- 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).
(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 user desire 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.
- Users want to be able to exchange messages without risk of the contents
of those messages being exposed to others.
- 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"
- Users want to be able to tell whether a message has been delivered.
- 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)
- (some) Users want to (occasionally) be able to send mail anonymously
- Senders want to be able to request receipt notification and be notified
if/when the message was received
- Recipients want to be able to read mail without the senders of messages
knowing that they've read their mail
- Users want to be able to exchange documents in native format
- Users want to be able to exchange messages without worrying about
whether the recipient can read the data format used in the message
- Users want to be able to exchange mail in any language that they can
read and write
- Users want to be able to spell their own email addresses in their
native languages
- Users want their email addresses to be memorable and transcribable
by recipients (who may use a language other than the sender's
native language)
- Users want to be able to access their email via a variety of
devices (desktops, webmail, PDAs, mobile phones, ???)
- Some users want to be able to access other messaging systems
(voicemail, fax) using email tools
- 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)
- Users want to be able to recall messages that have been sent but
not yet read.
- Users want to be able to send messages that will be disappear
if not read before some interval (expiration)