In my previous article on this subject, I have introduced Akonadi as the personal information beehive on your computer, explained how it works, how it is designed and what the migration process to an Akonadi-based Kontact looks like. (openSUSE users should also take a look here.) In this article, I will dive into the workspace parts we’re introducing on top of Akonadi, notably the new email notifier system in Plasma – Lion Mail.
The Lion Mail email notifier is at its base your "you’ve got mail" icon in the panel. For users with more complex and high-traffic email habits, it offers a basic set of workflow tools to manage the daily stream of emails more efficiently and ergonomically. In this article, I’m describing some of the design concepts behind Lion Mail’s email notifier and its workflow features.
Complex email workflows are something I wanted Lion Mail to excel at. The idea is to make dealing with email as flexible as we can, so you can project your workflow onto it and have it make the daily flow of email more manageable, and less disturbing in the real work you want to get done. By default, the Lion Mail email notifier shows up in your panel when a new email arrived in your inbox, by clicking on it you can access the list of your latest unread emails in a small popup-window. The basic use-case is quickly checking if you’ve got new email. I will not dive too much into implementation details, as this article is all about work-flows and how it affects the user experience.
The idea is that, at all times you can see if there’s email to deal with. but not have it jump in your face. In order to be able to quickly dismiss something as "I’ll deal with that one later", or "ok, got it", there’s two queues in Lion Mail, the stack and the heap of Lion Mail.
The Stack — Incoming Emails
The stack is your incoming emails queue, it lists new emails in one or more folders. By default, that’s your inbox, but you can configure it to monitor any folders you like (yes, combining them from multiple folders is built-in). The incoming emails queue is a transient thing, it’s your stream of incoming emails, and the first time a new email gets your attention (but doesn’t shout for it). The stack allows you to dismiss new emails, or mark them as read or important. The idea is that new emails might fall into the following categories:
- "Not right now" - A new email will get your attention later. You take notice of its existence now, but don’t have time right now to tend to it. It stays marked as unread, you’ll get back to it later.
- "This I really have to deal with, later" — If you don’t respond to this email, the world implodes into dark matter, or your head gets torn off by zombie-chinchillas. You mark the email as important, for extra attention, you can leave it marked as unread.
- "I am bored enough" — An email you deal with right away, either because it’s important or more interesting than what you’re currently doing, or maybe because it’s quicker to reply right now. In those cases, you open the email in your mail client to read it and possibly reply.
- "OK" — You notice an email and know enough by peeking at it. It can drown in your inbox from here on, you mark it as read.
- "v14gra on loan" – Something slipped the spam filters. You just want it gone. You hit the delete button and it won’t bother you again.
These are a couple of possible reactions to new emails. By offering the tools to deal with such situations at hand, in the context of these incoming emails, we can pre-sort the stream of mail while we receive it.
The Heap — Important Emails
This is where the heap comes in. The heap is an optional second list of emails you can show in the Lion Mail email notifier. It simply shows the important emails in your monitored folders. This way, it offers you a list of things you need to deal with, in essence your to-do list of emails. By putting them into a separate list, we have two overlapping categories of emails you want to deal with. Lion Mail can either display those important emails in a combined list, or using separate tabs for new and important emails. The latter is likely to appeal to David Allen fans, Lion Mail certainly is inspired by some of his ideas.
Email Items
The individual email items in the heap or stack offer a couple of options to open emails in your mail client, for marking emails as read and as important, and for deleting it. Needless to say that these buttons operate directly on the email, so the moment you mark an email in Lion Mail, it’ll change in KMail (or any other Akonadi-based email client) as well. When an email doesn’t satisfy the criteria for the heap of stack anymore, it fades out over a period of 5 seconds, so you get some "undo grace-time" if you clicked wrongly. The emails themselves show by default subject, sender, date and flags, you can expand to show some of the body as well. Email items employ a hover interface, when you move the mouse over an email, it reveals three controls as an overlay which offer flagging and trashing an email. Clicking on the icon opens the email in your mail client, you can also drag an email from these lists into your email client or Plasma workspace. I’ve chosen for a hover interface mainly for two reasons: less clicks and more discoverability. The emails don’t have a context menu right now, but there are a couple of useful options we could add there, for example forwarding or replying.
Excerpts — NLP people, listen up!
If someone comes up with a clever and useful implementation for email excerpts, I’m all open. Right now, I’m just showing the first couple of hundred characters in order to not blow the size of the widget beyond what’s reasonable in a small popup. As you can deduct, I’m not the most inspired mind in the world of language processing. In the UI, I’d rather avoid having to use scroll bars inside the expanded email body, as the list already might have scroll-bars. Nested scroll-bars will lead to annoying behaviour for mouse-wheel and flick-scrolling, so that should be avoided. The most elegant thing to do here is excerpting the interesting parts of the email, by skipping empty lines and possibly line-breaks, by removing reply-quoted parts, and so on. K9-Mail (a really good email client for Android) does this quite well, it’s often possible even from one line to judge an email’s content. We can easily fit 5 lines into the expanded email widget, and possibly even more, so I’d expect that with the right algorithm, we could do excellent there. If you’re into that kind of stuff, send me a piece of code that turns an email body (as QString, if you want) into a 200-300 character long excerpt, it should be LGPLed code and you’ll be properly credited. Sounds like a nice small, self-contained hacking project for a fall evening, no?
Otherwise, I wonder if "the other Sebastian"’s recent Nepomuk accomplishments in excerpting documents play into our collective hands, or we’re in his of course. :-)
Emails as first-class citizens in your workspace
There’s if course a lot more in the pipeline. In principle, Lion Mail can hold any email collection, existing folders, but also virtual collections, such as search folders or combinations of multiple folders. Lion Mail represents itself as an icon in the panel’s notification area, you can enable it in the notification area’s settings. It’s also possible to put Lion Mail widgets on the dashboard, desktop or netbook’s new page, you can of course add multiple Lion Mail applets holding different collections one one or different activities, and this way depending on what you are doing, think of showing your work’s inbox in your "work" activity, showing private emails in your "freetime" activity or showing neither in your hacking activity. In Lion Mail itself, that would be very easy to do, It’s built in mind with showing arbitrary sets of emails, the new email and important email queues are just specialized version of a generic email list.
Drag and drop is also one of the things that got a little bit of attention while developing Lion Mail. You can drag emails from Lion Mail into KMail for example to move or copy them to another folder. Plasma is also receptive to dropping mails (and in the future mail folders) onto the desktop. Lion Mail includes a Plasma widget showing an individual email. It can take different sizes, so you can either have a bunch of small emails floating around, or individual emails with full text on your desktop or dashboard for reference while working, as it often comes handy to have a related email available for a quick check if you’re looking into something.
Release plans and test-driving
In its current state, Lion Mail email notifier is already quite usable. The work to make it release-ready consists of completing some features, refreshing of monitored folders directly from the applet, and trashing emails. There’s also some smaller interaction glitches I’ll fix before it can make its way into Plasma cq. Kontact 4.6.0. There’s suspending removing items under your mouse (or finger) so you don’t accidentally click on the wrong email, some display funkiness here and there (spot the lack of space underneath emails in the screenshots), and the excerpts extraction I invited input to above. You’re already most welcome to try it and give feedback. It’s currently located in playground and will eventually move through the kdereview process into one of the released modules — I haven’t figured out which one would be the most suitable exactly. If you want to build it right now, I have to admit that it’s not completely trivial from scratch, as it requires kdelibs and kdepimlibs from trunk. If you have a reasonably recent 4.6 (trunk) snapshot installed, you should be good to go. Lion Mail does not offer the option to configure email accounts, you can do that from KMail2 or akonadiconsole.
Famous last words
The heap and the stack of Lion Mail offer the opportunity to create a more efficient workflow with your emails. By dealing with emails effectively as they come in, but without a context-switch to the full email application, it offers more workflow-based email management. The underlying idea behind Lion Mail is that emails become first-class object in your user experience, to integrate them as artifacts of your interesting information, rather than banning them into a monolithic application like traditional email clients. "Light-weight email work" can be done directly from the workspace, referencing emails in other tasks becomes a lot easier, the traditional email reader still serves as the work horse for most email reading (as opposed to noticing and referencing). Lion Mail provides the usual feature set in a more elegant and context-rich way. It is also heavily optimized for people with larger amounts of emails, and integration these streams of new and interesting emails deeper into the workflow of the user.
A common misunderstanding is that Akonadi is some sort of groupware server. In fact, Akonadi does not store any data itself, but just provides a common means to access data to your local applications.
Many people are interested in the current status of Kontact’s Akonadi port. Initially, KDE had planned to release the new Kontact along with the rest of the KDE Applications 4.5. This did not quite work out, so we pushed the release back a bit, and are planning to release it along with one of the 4.5.x updates. The current plan is to release the Akonadi port of Kontact still this year. In contrast to our usual releases, this step is a bit different. Since PIM data is critically important, we are extending the beta phase until the Akonadi port of Kontact passes a much wider range of QA tests. When we are able to release depends a lot on the feedback we get from users. We are therefore making available monthly beta releases of the new Kontact suite. Data loss in this late phase of the port is extremely unlikely, and we made sure that trying the new Kontact doesn’t mean you must now also do the switch. You can in fact just reinstall the old one and use that again, since separate configuration files are used.
The traditional Kontact, is of course still fully usable and we currently recommend this to end users. Kontact 4.4 is still actively maintained and supported, and is shipped by distributions along with KDE 4.5.0, so the current stable Kontact is 4.4.5. We did ship a new release of kdepimlibs, which are tested with Kontact 4.4.5 and are the basis for Kontact2 as well.
You might have noticed the first parts of KMail1 being converted. That is to say that the Kontact developers have worked towards the Akonadi port of KMail. The first, and actually one of the most central parts of KMail has already been introduced a while ago: the new listview. This listview is a rework of KMail’s list of messages to use the underlying Model-View-Controller design patterns that match Akonadi well. In Kontact 4.4, Kontact’s address book has been switched to use Akonadi. This first step in the migration was a bit painful, since it involved introducing a new infrastructure below applications that you use daily, and which you rely upon. The new possibilities are already making their way to the end users’ systems, for example in the calendar integration with the Plasma Desktop, which you can see in the screenshot. By clicking on the clock, you get the Plasma calendar which shows you your daily events. In the sceenshot, you can see the new version of KMail. As I’m using a full-HD display, I’ve enabled the widescreen layout of KMail. This makes it possible to see the whole email and a long enough list of others at once. A nice touch, which has been available for ages in KMail — just in case you wondered.
During Akademy, I’ve picked up the work on Lion Mail again. It is not quite done yet, but already looking very good. I’m nearing feature completion for a first release now, so I’m almost sure it will become part of Plasma 4.6 in January, currently it’s in alpha state but quite fun already. Interested users can of course check out the source from SVN, it’s currently located in playground unti the code is ready for review by my eagle-eyed fellow hackers. Lion Mail is a set of Plasma widgets that can be used to display and manipulate emails in Plasma. In Tampere, Finland, during Akademy, I’ve discussed design and workflow of email notifications with a lot of people, after that I sat down for some serious hacking and have already implement most of what I would like to see, email-wise, in Plasma 4.6. The main goal is to be non-intrusive, and making it as easy as possible to manage your email in your daily workflow. The email notifier provides a queue of your emails, but does so without the need to switch to the full-blown KMail, so no full context / attention switch is needed if you just quickly want to see what’s going on in your inbox.
Unfortunately, most normal email notifiers are pretty useless for high-volume emailers, especially if you use server-side filtering (which you should because it’s much more convenient when using multiple clients, especially mobile ones). In my case, I have about 60 folders, on3 different email accounts (work-work, private, gmail). Emails are filtered before they reach the client. I am personally far less interested in new emails in all folders called “inbox”. The Plasma email notifier allows you to choose the folder you want it to monitor. You can also set up multiple folders. As a nice extra, you can choose to also display emails marked as important, either merged or in a separate list (actually, the latter is not implemented yet, but on my short-term TODO list :-)). Emails are draggable, so you can drag an email from the email notifier into a folder in KMail2 if you want to copy or move it there. As I mentioned before, we’re not actually dragging the email around, but an Akonadi reference as a URL. This is fully transparent between applications, and even across toolkit and access libraries. I’ve also written a full-fledged single email Plasmoid, which allows you to put individual emails on your desktop (or dashboard) for quick reference. Just drag the email from the list onto your desktop, and it’ll appear as Plasma widget there, expandable, with HTML if you’re into that. The missing bits are rather overseeable at this point: clearing the list, separate list for important emails, refreshing logic for individual folders and queuing the re-jigging of the list until the mouse moves out, so items don’t change under your mouse while clicking on them. Not just minor bugfixes, but at the current pace, also not a lot of work left to do.
Akonadi plugs into the Nepomuk semantic framework for its indexing and searching needs. Items in Akonadi are therefore magically available for applications using Nepomuk to query and display data. Tags and other metadata is shared across the desktop, arbitrary items can be linked semantically (think emails and attachments linked to contacts in your address book). Akonadi in Kontact does not only mean that Akonadi is coming to full bloom, but also the semantic desktop built on top of Nepomuk. One nice example is shown in the screenshot, where the KRunner mini-commandline (hit ALT+F2!) also finds emails now. Part of the semantic desktop are also the Activities, which provide context to applications. You can think of ‘context’ as a project your working on, your current location, and many other “metadata” of your workflow. One features of Lion Mail which has been part of its idea from the beginning is showing different sets of emails per activity, the email notifier is built with activities in mind.
