Improving Mail Reading

I read a lot of email. Most of us do. Most of us have also, in one way or another, learnt how to correctly snip mails, who to actually reply, how to properly ask questions, and other matters of email etiquette. Those who haven’t, create work for those who have to read their mails.

I spend too much effort on non-snipped mails. How many times doesn’t one start with scrolling a large mail in order to find what the author actually has written, or scrolled down to the end of a mail only to find out it was merely the remnants of what the author replied? I think one can extend email clients, such as KMail, to make the absence of snipping unnoticeble to the user.

The solution consists of a mechanism I’ve dubbed paragraph folding.

Paragraph folding is conceptually identical to code folding; the latter being demonstrated in this screenshot of Kate. In KMail it would look the same way as in Kate, the +/- boxes on the side, but instead of folding code snippets surrounded by brackets and so on, it would fold paragraphs.

In most mails there is an awful lot of text of no interest, be it in a thread in private or on a mailing list. By letting KMail intelligently fold away these paragraphs, the user doesn’t have to do it mentally.

For example, when you read a follow-up you mostly already know what the follow-up replies to. Typically a section in the followup-mail is of two kinds: either a single paragraph, or two or more paragraphs. In the former case, KMail wouldn’t auto-fold anything, but in the latter it would fold all paragraphs except the last. By keeping the last paragraph the reader has a “key” into what the reply is replying, but the user doesn’t have to scroll all the text leading up to it.

Redundant text is also often found at the bottom of emails. People forget to snip, information is kept for reference, commercials from “free” email services, mailing list banners, and so on. There is no way the reader can know whether there’s important content at the bottom, forcing her to scroll.

This can also be made more efficiently by doing auto-folding: if the content after the last content written by the followup-author is a signature or text from the mail being replied, the content is folded, because it is guaranteed there’s nothing worth to read.

Another idea is performing an initial auto-scroll. When the user views a mail, KMail automatically scrolls to the beginning of the reply, such that the user doesn’t have to scroll the old-conversation leading up to it.

Implementing paragraph folding and auto-scrolling could be quite fun. However, the discussion above is simplified, and many issues, both good and bad, is waiting to be discovered. It’s also a features of the kind which easily leads to requests to add options in case it is implemented incorrectly(and adding options would worsen the interface). It’s neither sure these ideas are actually good — only usability testing can tell.

The reason to why email has this tendency to overload with information, has to do with how the media works. While an email thread always evolves and takes the disussion to new places, the mails works in the opposite direction by striving to keep all the previous discussion in each mail. I believe parahraph folding can be a significant aid for that.