Basic idea:



Email should be organized and presented to the user around his/her work projects and tasks, not as individual, discrete messages. We should also have a hierarchical, tree-structured view of email so that the (too) many replies and forwards can be viewed in the context of the original email. This hierarchical view would allow one to delete an entire sub-tree from his/her inbox if he/she was not interested in a spin-off conversation.



What would this accomplish?



You should read the "how does this work" first. After reading that, this part might make more sense. What I'm suggesting here is that we fundamentally redesign email from being an interrupt-driven process to a more user-centered, work-task-centered process. Today, our inboxes are really just collections of things people sent us. You can order them by date, or urgency (as perceived by the sender, not the viewer), or subject (which doesn't work well due to the FW: RE: appends). But your inbox today is still pretty much a collection of extenal inputs which are A) hard to manage and B) not easily associated with the work tasks you are doing. We need to turn this process around so that the inbox is easier to manage when you have many many replies, forwards, etc. based on a single original email and so that the inbox may be viewed in the context of the work tasks that are driving your job.



Imagine the productivity gain if you could send out an email and automatically view all the immediate replies to your original only, or you could easily see the whole reply/forward tree and pick out just the email you need to read. And better yet, if you decide that an entire branch of the conversation doesn't interest you, you could lop it off by deleting the sub-tree that spun off at that point. And when you're done with the whole topic, you could quickly delete ALL the emails that spun off from your original with one click at the top of the tree. Now that's inbox management!



Secondly, imagine that you can organize your email around the work tasks to which they relate. You'll have a view of your inbox that just shows you emails you identified (either when you originated them or when you first read them) as being relevant to some task. Now, you can go to your "Task" view of your inbox, and instead of seeing headings like "urgent", "Calendar items", or "normal", the headings are "Quality task force" or "July steering committee planning". With this view of my inbox, I can quickly find the inbox items I need to move a task forward without sorting through the 5 pages of inbox that are NOT relevant. I'll deal with the others later from my normal inbox view. But if I want to deal with my hot items first, I can, and the "Task" view of the inbox is my tool.



Combining these two concepts would be very powerful. I can have a Task view of my inbox, and under each task is my hierarchical view of each email thread with which I'm involved. I can quickly find all the emails I need to move a task forward. I can delete or file them en masse when I'm done.



How would this work?



This idea really has 2 parts. Part 1: Create a view for the inbox that shows all emails grouped into hierarchical discussion threads. Within this hierarchical view of an inbox, I can then manage all emails that grew out of an original email as a tree. Visual design suggestion: just indent the emails under each other based on how far down the reply/forward thread is from the original. Within this hierarchical tree, I can instantly find all emails that are related to the original and see who sent them. I can see their rough relationship to the original. And, the key productivity aid, is that I can prune the tree more quickly by deleting the higher-up branches. If I delete the original email from this view, all sub-branches are removed. If I file the original, the whole tree is filed. Similarly, I can delete any particular branch of the tree and the action is applied to all sub-branches that sprouted from that email. This would be a huge productivity gain for the average person's inbox.



Now, to part 1 we add part 2: We need a way to "tag" an email (and its whole thread) as being associated with a given work task. Let's say that I'm involved in a project and I send a half-dozen emails associated with that project to colleagues. I await all the responses to those emails, and the responses to the responses, etc. until I get the information I want. What I want to do is to view all these emails (actually the complete threads for all these emails) grouped under the associated work task. I can then absorb all the information at the same time. If we then create a view for my inbox which groups the email under these tags, now we can view email in the context of the work I'm doing, vs. just a list of "urgent" or "normal" emails.

We might be able to use the Notes To-Do feature to implement this. I add a to-do to my list, and then I can send out emails to people related to this to-do. (Perhaps the to-do screen has a "new memo" button which then creates the association automatically.) This association would be private to my view of notes…the receiver of the email doesn't need to know. But I could, while viewing this to-do, view all the emails I sent and the subsequent reply trees. This automated collection and association of emails to my work tasks would be a big help.



(Note: The subset of this idea related to management of the Inbox by threads was also submitted as a separate request.)