The NextMail’11 workshop will focus on current research and emerging trends in email research. I’m happy to be a part of the program committee for the workshop, which will be held as part of the IEEE / WIC / ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology August 22, 2011 in Lyon, France.

You can read the full Call For Papers for all the details, but relevant topics include:

• Email content analysis, information extraction, summarization
• Email social networks in enterprise
• Email management strategies within organizations
• Adaptative email agents and semantic agents
• Emails archives exploration, visualization, regulations and behaviors
• Email visual interfaces and human/computer interaction with emails
• Case studies, experiments and user studies on emails usages
• Benchmark and email testing datasets
• Interoperability over email with enterprise resources and legacy systems
• Semantic email and email mining
• Unified messaging and web interactions : instant messaging, RSS feeds, annotations, tagging
• Personal information management integration in email clients, pending task management
• Interaction between email , PIM and the mobility factor
• Facing the volume growth, do we need to replace the old protocols?
• Evolution of infrastructures and uses

Papers are due by 21st March 2011, so get writing!

Launched 5 months ago Subtextual (until recently, known as bccthis) is an interesting plug-in for Microsoft Outlook that allows the mixing of public (visible to all recipients) and private (visible only to specific recipients) content within a single email message. This allows a sender to send a single message, but add private context addressed to only those people that need it.

Subtextual adds the ability to send a hidden message as part of a normal email message. This hidden content is visible only to selected message recipients – other recipients never see any indication that the message has any additional content. Happily, recipients don’t need any plug-in to view Subtextual messages.

As well as the Outlook plugin, Subtextual also have a Twitter client (which seems less compelling to me), a FireFox plug-in for using Subtextual with Gmail and a BlackBerry application.

While clearly an interesting idea, I’m not sure whether Subtextual, is significant enough to be more than just another feature for Outlook. I am, however, impressed with their family of products across desktop, mobile and web-based email. Together with their recently announced premium version of the Outlook plug-in, it feels like the company is busy experimenting, trying to discover the platforms which can deliver them traction, customers and revenue. I am very interested to see in which direction this company will pivot in the future.

While it’s widely acknowledged that desktop email clients have been slow to adapt to changing volumes and styles of email use, the problem is arguably more acute in the mobile space. For starters, obviously the device form factors influence how people use mobile email – you’re not likely to see people typing long-winded messages with their thumbs – yet many mobile email clients are essentially designed as smaller versions of desktop email clients. Mobile email users typically focus on triaging their messages to determine what’s new, what they can delete right away, and what’s important enough to handle immediately. They often defer everything else until they are at a desktop or laptop with a full keyboard and larger display.

I think it’s worth spending 7 minutes or so to watch the video below, where Jeff Pierce outlines the project:

There’s more information, including a short paper, also available at the Triage and Capture: Rethinking Mobile Email website.

I’m guessing Apple has rolled-their-own date recognition code, probably using simple rules or regular expressions. Does anyone know more about the technology behind this feature?

(Hat tip to Rob Tot for alerting me to this functionality)

This seems like an interesting turn of events to me. I know Nokia is also working on a Perl for Symbian project as well, so it would appear that this is merely the latest in a series of events aimed at making the S60 a more attractive and diverse platform for developers. One day I’ll actually make time to properly play with some of this cool mobile technology!!

A quick search of SourceForge suggests that the PyS60 project seems to be this announced project. Unfortunately, it currently has no sourcecode, or indeed any files, available for download. The Nokia Open Source site similarly has a Python for S60 page setup, but no source code available yet. I’ll be keeping an eye out for the software to match Nokia’s release though – if anyone else has already located it, please leave a comment!