David Ferris of Ferris Research posted an entry titled: Urgent: Find a Solution to Top-of-Inbox Task Prioritization.
Below are a few ways in which Zimbra can make working with email a more productive experience.
First off, folders are a thing of the past. Everything can live in the INBOX– 10’s of thousands of messages or more!
This may seem crazy, but it works.
First, create a default search that filters out mail lists and bulk email(builds reports, source control checkin’s, etc).
This creates an inbox that only contains “quality mail”. (SPAM and virus are already filtered out by Spam Assassin and ClamAV.)
Mail is organized into conversations, so it’s easy to see at a glance all the replies to the thread. This helps tremendously when someone else on the thread has already answered the question or taken action. With other email systems, subsequent replies may have been buried in your INBOX and any reply you make may have been redundant. With Zimbra, it’s easy to follow-up or ignore the thread based on the current context.
If you’ve been away from mail for some time or you work with lots of external customers and partners you can use an “Outside” search which filters out mail from internal domain (ex. zimbra.com) addresses. This enables the ability to read/reply to threads with external folks first. Anything that needs follow-up can be quickly tagged for later reference. When it’s time to catch up on a mail list, a quick search in Zimbra can display traffic from one or more lists. This makes it very easy and quick to browse the messages; again grouped into conversations so all the related messages are tied together.
When you need to go looking for something in mail it’s usually a very short order task. Zimbra lets you search on the full text of the message, headers, recipients, size, attachment size/type, date range, incoming or outgoing domain, tags, etc. If you can’t remember the exact search, no worries as we’ve got a search builder that lets you construct the search. Oh and this can all be done via a web browser. So no matter if you’re at home, at work or on vacation with access to only a internet cafe– you get the same functionality.
on November 4th, 2005 at 1:54 pm
Folders are an orgainziational tool. A tool to pre segreagate information. Now picture a company with hundreds of users with “10’s of thousands of messages” searchin all of them (search to eliminate the junk included). Think of the type of system(s) required to handle that BLOAT.
The methodology that you mention leads to horrible long term issues and major user scaling issues. Searching a subset of related information will always lead to quicker results and less system overhead.
on November 4th, 2005 at 2:09 pm
>> Think of the type of system(s) required to handle that BLOAT.
That’s the beauty of Zimbra. Your not literally searching over 10’s of thousands of messages. Your searching a pre-built index. Much like Google let’s you search billions of web pages with sub-second results. We designed a system that scales well with large mailboxes and huge user bases. Many of us come from the ISP/carrier world where many deployments had 10’s of MILLIONS of users. The systems most enterprises need/use today are dwarfed by carrier/ISP class systems. Zimbra has engineered those same HUGE system scaling principals and INNOVATIVE end-user features into a new class of mail servers.
>>Searching a subset of related information will always lead to quicker results and less system overhead.
Quicker; yes (fractions of a second difference in our architecture), but far less accurate results. If you really want to search for something in your inbox where your inbox has “self-organized” you need/want to search all the mail. Zimbra does this and it does it very well.