I know I’m stating the obvious, but email is very very broken.<\/p>\n
I have two email accounts, one personal and one for work, and they are both, each in their own way, profoundly broken.\u00a0 Like most people, I actually have a bunch of email addresses, but they’re logically separated into work and personal.\u00a0 I use a combination of Gmail and Thunderbird for my personal mail, and Groupwise for my work mail.<\/p>\n
I try to manage my personal account so that at least occasionally I get to the mythical zero inbox<\/a>, but my corporate account with 3,000 messages in it is just a stream that flows by with me on the river bank with a pathetic net trying to catch the most important bits roaring by.\u00a0 Right at this moment I have 19 emails open on my desktop, awaiting action.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I think that people who don’t work in a corporate environment don’t understand the central role that corporate email systems (Outlook\/Exchange, Notes, or Novell’s own Groupwise) play in the lives of their inmates<\/span> users.\u00a0 Meetings are scheduled, documents are exchanged, decisions are made, and long-running debates are all handled exclusively within these email systems.\u00a0 I know that the kids<\/a> and the Koreans<\/a> don’t use email any more, but for large organizations, email is practically the system of record for most purposes.\u00a0 (Xobni Insight for Outlook is supposed to be good, but I don’t have any personal experience with it.)<\/p>\n On the personal, non-corporate side, there have been many runs taken at the Problem of Email.\u00a0 Notably, there was the\u00a0 Chandler <\/a>fiasco; more recent failures were the very nice Seek<\/a> extension for Thunderbird from the Simile project at MIT, the short-lived “I Want Sandy” email assistant, and myriad universal inbox solutions.<\/p>\n Sandy’s sister, cc:Betty<\/a>, looks promising, and Thunderbird fork called Postbox<\/a> has garnered some praise.\u00a0 I’ve been using the version 3 beta of Thunderbird and I really like it — so much so that I’ve moved back to using a client after switching away for the charms of Gmail<\/a>.<\/p>\n I think\u00a0 Google’s Gmail was the first real innovation in email in quite a long time.\u00a0 For me, the progression goes: mail –> elm –> Eudora –> Thunderbird –> Gmail.\u00a0 And now, Gmail+Thunderbird. \u00a0 I don’t like everything about Gmail; the conversation view still baffles me, I don’t really use tagging effectively, I can’t stand not being able to sort by sender, and I don’t understand how it treats deleted and archived messages.\u00a0 But abandoning the complex folder structure I’d developed over the years was really liberating once I trusted the system.\u00a0 If there’s going to be real on-going innovation in email, I wouldn’t bet against Google and Gmail Labs<\/a>.<\/p>\n There’s an excellent discussion of the Problem of Email in the comments to an article by Alastair Croll on GigaOM entitled “Why Email Clients Need to Change<\/a>.”\u00a0 The article is worth reading but the discussion is outstanding.<\/p>\n Of the new entrants trying to solve the (personal, non-corporate) Problem of Email, the best one I’ve seen is OtherInbox<\/a>.\u00a0 It works with your existing IMAP email to categorize and sort your messages.\u00a0 It in effect applies preset filters to your messages and seems to be directed at people who have lots of social media updates in their in-box — it groups Facebook messages, for instance.\u00a0 But it points the way forward, I think, by recognizing that there are actually several distinctive kinds of messages in your inbox, each of which can be dealt with in a different but standard way.<\/p>\n What really got me thinking was, as usual, a visual representation of data; this time, of emails in Croll’s inbox, analyzed using the excellent mail-trends<\/a> tool.<\/p>\n After all, most email is (relatively)\u00a0 structured text; Croll had a lot of Twitter traffic in his in-box, but that doesn’t seem to me to be an especially mainstream case.\u00a0 But it’s one of many, viz.:<\/p>\n Purchases<\/strong><\/p>\n This is a little workflow; you buy something, the vendor sends you a confirmation.\u00a0 Then when the order ships, they send you a tracking number.\u00a0 You need to make sure that the order was correct in the first place and then, perphaps after giving it a relevant name (“new sandals” instead of LL Bean Order #2342423) you want the workflow to keep track of it, perhaps in a calendar view, and update you on its status and throw a flag after a certain period if you haven’t received it.\u00a0 After acknowledging receipt in the workflow, this thread should be silently archived and disappear from view.\u00a0 It would be in the interest of, say, Amazon, to offer easy hooks to do this.<\/p>\n Mailing Lists<\/strong><\/p>\n These have a different behavior than order tracking; they’re best put into a bulletin board view by themselves, with some simple, configurable, rules: keep them in a threaded discussion for two weeks unless I take some other action on them.\u00a0 Then they can silently fall off the end of the thread, unless they’re subscription or administrative messages, which ought to be archived.<\/p>\n Reminders\/Alerts<\/strong><\/p>\n These are more important and should appear in some insistent form, perhaps in some status bar<\/a> like Growl<\/a> — “meeting in ten minutes”, “on a conference call”, “on a call” — and\/or on a calendar view.\u00a0 Then, after the time of the appointment has passed, it should automagically disappear.\u00a0 No threaded discussion view, no workflow.\u00a0 But wouldn’t it be nice if your calendar automatically updated your status?<\/p>\n Non-spam ads (opt-in vendor mail)<\/strong><\/p>\n Spam is at this point a solved problem; I’m thinking instead here of emails from the local minor league hockey team advertising kids’ day or a deal from my garden supply store that I want to know about.\u00a0 I would set up a rule for these to appear in my main stream but automatically disappear after a day or two.\u00a0 Linking to the opt-out function as a check box or something would be fantastic.\u00a0 The hive mind would help a lot here.<\/p>\n Account Info<\/strong><\/p>\n This category requires special handling; I’d like to see anything with username or password information automatically encrypted and stored.\u00a0 This function alone would be a major win in my book.<\/p>\n Personal Mail<\/strong><\/p>\n Anything from a recognized (white-list) sender, especially if it is single-recipient, should go to the top of the stream.\u00a0 It would be nice to apply GTD<\/a>-style rules as an option.<\/p>\n Travel<\/strong><\/p>\n This is a big one for me; I use Tripit <\/a>to manage my travel itineraries, and I think it’s invaluable.\u00a0 I email Tripit my hotel reservation and my flight information and it puts it together for me; I’d like my email system to do something similar.\u00a0 After all, Delta’s itineraries are nothing more than structured text waiting to be parsed into a calendar, status, and archive system.\u00a0 (This is the classic semantic web use case.)<\/p>\n Other<\/strong><\/p>\n For me, Twitter and Facebook updates aren’t a big deal, but they seem to be important to some — I can imagine that there are lots of other categories that aren’t relevant to me but are everyday hassles for others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I know I’m stating the obvious, but email is very very broken. I have two email accounts, one personal and one for work, and they are both, each in their own way, profoundly broken.\u00a0 Like most people, I actually have … Continue reading