Too much of a good thing

On April 1, Google announced that it was creating a Web-based e-mail service that would put a search engine at the center of the users' e-mail experience. Perhaps the only person in Silicon Valley wishing that the announcement was a particularly unfunny April Fools' joke was Raymie Stata, the founder and CTO of Stata Labs, which first unveiled its search-focused e-mail system more than a year ago. Stata Labs makes a product called Bloomba, an e-mail program meant to be a faster, more useful alternative to Outlook or Eudora. Stata, a young computer scientist who once worked on the Alta Vista search engine, conceived of the system after noticing a couple of things: how well users took to the idea of searching on the Web, and how poorly the dominant e-mail programs searched through their mail. "Outlook," Stata says, "is a fundamentally broken product." Searching for a single message out of thousands "literally takes forever" -- which is to say, it can take minutes, which on a computer might as well be literally forever. In Bloomba, which indexes all of your e-mail in a database for fast searching, searching for a message takes seconds, as fast or faster than Google will return a Web search.

Bloomba is an excellent mail program. It is fast, pretty and intuitive, and when you use it it becomes clear that the program has been especially designed for people who get a lot of e-mail, and for whom setting up an elaborate set of folders and filters is not a fun task. This model can be a bit hard for some people to get used to at first, Stata says; when people start to use the system, their natural instinct is to build a set of folders in which to store their messages. Bloomba does allow you to create folders, which is probably a good thing -- e-mail users have been so steeped in the idea of putting stuff into folders that doing away with them might have freaked people out. But the software "subtly discourages people from building carefully managed hierarchies," Stata says, and when people reach the second or third day of working on Bloomba, they arrive at what Stata calls an "epiphany point." Users suddenly realize that they can trust the search engine, that they really can forget about filing. There is a strange sense of liberation associated with this moment; when you don't have to worry about filing, when the guilt of keeping all your messages in one big stash is wiped away because you now have access to a fantastic search engine that can find anything you want, e-mail can seem pretty pleasant. You might even call it fun.

One feels a similar thing with Gmail, Google's Web-based mail program. Conceptually, Gmail, which is still in an invitation-only, beta release, works a lot like Bloomba. It discourages folder hierarchies and encourages users to get at their messages through the search engine. What's amazing about Gmail is that even though it's a Web-based application, it is lightning fast -- as fast or faster than every desktop mail program, including Bloomba. And Gmail features one of the first truly novel innovations in an e-mail interface to come along in a long while, "conversation view." The system presents a conversation thread -- a group of back-and-forth e-mail messages between you and your boss, say, or a 65-message set from a particularly boisterous mailing list -- into a single visual pane, allowing you to read every e-mail in its proper context. Actions can be performed on entire conversations instead of on single messages -- so you can delete or archive those 65 mailing list messages with a single click.

Conversation view is not an entirely new concept; e-mail interface researchers have been calling for its introduction for years. Gina Venolia, at Microsoft Research, and Nicolas Ducheneaut, at PARC, have even built and tested working prototypes of e-mail systems that employ this concept. So why is Google the first company to release it? "Because it's fresh code," says Venolia. "Once you start thinking of e-mail from the ground up, you can do a lot of these kinds of things."

Because Google and Bloomba don't have to worry about offending an installed base of users, they can do radical things like suggest an end to mail folders. For Microsoft, which has to constantly guard against offending the sensibilities of the almost 400 million worldwide users of Outlook, change must come more slowly. Venolia -- who is personally a fan of the no-filing, always-searching model of e-mail organization used by systems like Bloomba and Gmail -- suggested that future versions of Microsoft's e-mail programs would likely offer some version of an improved search, and possibly some improvements in the user-interface akin to conversation view. She noted that Longhorn, the code name for Microsoft's upcoming version of Windows, would likely be the place for those improvements. (Current users of Outlook who can't wait so long for a better search engine for their e-mail ought to consider trying an indexing program such as Lookout or X1. These programs essentially transform Outlook into the same sort of program as Bloomba or Gmail -- an e-mail client with a very fast search engine.)

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