mail-ng
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: list of user-visible goals

2004-02-05 07:48:46

At 10:27 04/02/05 +0100, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

On 5-feb-04, at 2:29, Keith Moore wrote:

I've attempted to collect a list of user-visible goals that people have sent in and to loosely organize them. I've probably missed a few by accident. I deliberately left out a couple of goals that I couldn't see how to express from a user's point-of-view.

Anyway, take a look, and feel free to fill in any gaps you see.

What I'm missing:

- users want to be able to use email in ad-hoc environments where no servers are available and/or make use of ad-hoc environments to expedite mail delivery (especially of large messages)

- users want copies of their mail to be kept

- user don't want copies of stuff that's already sitting elsewhere to be added to their mail copy store

- users want to be sure that mail they send is delivered unaltered

- users want automated format and maybe even language conversion where appropriate

- users want to receive messages unaltered

(I think I mentioned this before):
- 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.


- users want to see quotes of other messages

- users don't want to download quotes of other messages

- users want to be certain that quotes of other messages are authentic

- users want quotes of other messages to be suppressed or displayed in a particular format

- 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)

- users want to know what happened to messages in transit

- users don't want all kinds of mail programs to insert their life history into messages leading to excessive headers

Add to this the contrary (nobody said user requirements don't contradict):

- users want to know the life history of a message for policy/filtering/...
  decisions as well as to trace problems.


- users want to be notified *immediately* when they have new mail without having to activily check for it continously


Regards,   Martin.