Re: visions

> >>The obvious answer is because this is a mailing list (not a BBS, or a
> >>web-log, or a newsgroup).  Clearly the focus of this mailing list is
> >>on "the next generation of mail".
> >
> > The answer isn't obvious at all.
> > If you look at
> >     http://www.imc.org/mail-ng/mail-archive/msg00562.html
> > what do you see?
> >
> > A HTML page. Is it still an email? If not, why not?
>
> It's not, because I cannot do things with it that I can do with email
> (e.g. reply to the sender, submit a follow-up with correct References).
> Also precisely because it is text/html and not message/rfc822 (there
> is a somewhat related ongoing discussion on the ietf-822 list, by the
> way).
>
> Less formally, the "duck" test (if it looks like a duck, walks like a
> duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck) indicates it's not email:
> it doesn't look like email, it's not accessed like email, and it can't
> be replied to, forwarded, etc. like email.
Actually, we were considering this issue a couple of days here.

Why have email? It seems that a lot of things which we currently do with 
email could be done in other ways (but not all, if you exclude IM, which we 
decided was basically a restricted subset of email, in essence)
Mailing lists could just as easily (probably more easily, to most people) 
be done through the web, as that seems (to many people) to be a more 
suitable medium.
I think if you're looking at the 'next generation' of email, a legitimate 
question to ask is 'is email the right system to use for communication'.
We basically decided that an interesting idea would be to consider an IETF 
standard for web forums... This would allow a standardised way of accessing 
data from them. This, in turn, would allow, for instance, me to set up a 
'portal' to show me all the web forums I'm interested in wherever they may 
be, and how many new messages are waiting on them, and even do filters to 
see if any messages I might be interested are there, then I could click on 
a link to take me to that forum.
I think most (non-techie) people would prefer something like this rather 
than mailing lists.
I was analysing my email contents, about 70% was spam, so I don't want 
that, 20% was mailing list messages (most of which I wasn't interested in), 
so that could be handled using web forums (with appropriate standardisation 
& portals to make them easier to manage etc), 9% was technical support 
requests to us, which is actually read into our web based ticket management 
system (so that could be handled fully using the web), the other 1% was 
personal or one-to-one email which is the bit that would be more tricky to 
handle without using an email-like system (or IM)
We concluded that for OUR usage here, we'd be quite happy not to have email 
(even though our company's main product is email based...) and have most 
stuff web based and use a 'next generation IM system' for our personal 
stuff (I haven't come across an IM system which is as usable as email, long 
term, yet - I suspect mainly due to crummy clients)
(Maybe personal/one-to-one email should actually be handled by lots of 
private web forums - basically 'web mail', but without the mail bit..)
Maybe this is off-topic, but I'm not so sure. Maybe 'next generation email' 
would not be email at all. Why MUST it be?
Having things web based would actually meet a LOT of the end-user criteria..

(Actually, I don't believe I'm saying this, as I hate HTML email, and, 
currently, prefer mailing lists to web forums myself, but...)

Paul                            VPOP3 - Internet Email Server/Gateway
support(_at_)pscs(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk                     http://www.pscs.co.uk/