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As with discussion types this page lists the building block mail types that will be on offer at the start of the "mail" service. This page does not discuss the different ways that mail items might be displayed in a users "mailbox". |
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Unlike Discussion Areas where the standard items are differentiated by function and form drawn from a set of standard features, the mail items are largely defined by form only. However, postcards and stickies are special cases of communication types but I put them here for completeness. In each case where the table says for example "'one' to 'many'", "one" may be taken to be an individual or a community. |
Plain vanilla mail
Name, date, community, history (who's read, when) avaliable, text body.
Item can one to many, one to one.
Greetings card
Displays sender's name and thumbnail image as : <Greetings> from: Sendername
<Greetings> would be a user choice from this list: Happy Birthday, Congratulations, Best Wishes, Happy Christmas, Happy Easter, Happy Thanksgiving, Hello,... list needs to be visited with view to US / UK needs, cultural and ethnic needs (Happy Divali etc)Image selected from standard set of clip art images provided.
Item can be one to many, many to one, one to one.
Ticker Tape
Displays sender's name and date plus up to N characters (say 100). Graphical representation stresses "urgency" and telegrams appear first in your mail list as a default user setting.
Ticker Tape can only be one way, from one sender.
Announcements
A formal announcement (like the births deaths weddings columns) displays sender's name and date plus "announcement item" which will also be picked up by the News Service at Community level. These are always 'public' items.
Announcements can only be one to many, many to many.
Postcards
These are public documents within a community. They are used for pointing to interesting sites outside the Beehive / MillieMail service. The principle here is to build a shared resource of individual contributions within each community along the lines of "This site is lovely, wish you were here...", or more precisely "This site was very useful for me as part of my XXX activity, for these reasons..."
Some debate needed about whether in a perfect world the postcard would be framed as a subwindow showing the site within the postcard frame, or whether this would be so slow as to prove useless and a 'thumbnail' might be possible?
Postcards are a very important part of way that the service can sit at the heart of the WWW adding value though the 'annotation' of other's use of the web.
Postcards can only be one to many.
Stickies
Remembering the popularity of these from our Schools OnLine project, they are key motivators for users.
Stickies can be added by any member of a page's author's community directly to any page (for page read any content item). Only the page's author can read it. They carry the 'thumbnail' image of the sender and a few comments ("loved your poem...")
Stickies are pasted to the pertinent page / content (see debate elsewhere about level of granularity of these) but you get a notice of them in your mail box ("You have stickies !...")
Stickies can only be one to one.
discussion blueprint | portfolio of behaviours | mail blueprint | project plan timings