AngelMail: uma solução integrada de priorização, visualização e organização de email

Abstract

Email is a communication medium different from the others, emerged in the 70s, and still one of the most widely used around the world for professional and personal purposes. It is one of the most successful computer applications yet invented, mainly because it allows to send and receive messages at anytime and from anywhere in the world. Some of its success factors also contribute to the major problems that are now intrinsic to email. Currently, emails are used for several purposes and consequently we find ourselves faced with a dramatic increase of the number of messages delivered. The majority of users gets every day a large volume of emails with different priorities and sometimes for different email accounts, that contributes to forget important replies, the cluttering of messages, the increase of the time spent on email processing and as a result a decrease of productivity. The proliferation of mobile devices in society, such as PDAs, tablets and smartphones, has led to its increasing use to visualize emails. However the current applications are still not providing a suitable support for the management of all the information that is transmitted. In order to address these and other problems, this thesis proposes the solution AngelMail whose main objectives are the prioritization of messages, and an effective visualization and organization of messages. The solution consists of a server and an email client for Gmail and Android mobile devices. On the server, each email is pre-processed and assigned a classification according to their relevance to the user. On the client is provided a preview of the email according to the above classification. To help organize their emails, the interface supports a workflow processing, whose definition took into account the needs and habits observed in users analyzed. The methodology of the study was based on an initial analysis of the most frequent email problems and the state of the art for their resolution. After that a study of the current use of email was performed to survey the needs and habits of its users. After gathering this information, a solution was specified and designed, and a prototype developed to test and validate the solution. In general, the solution AngelMail differs from traditional email applications. Through better visualization and effective email organization, it aims to contribute to a better handling of high volume of emails, to increase productivity, and to reduce the time spent on email processing.