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A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

thenextweb.com

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Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

#31

Post by kscaldef »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #17
rogerbinns wrote: post #10

So if both sender and recipient are using this, they'll end up demanding increasing classifications from each other in an infinite loop? I think the actual solution will turn out to be something like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000 The important difference is that the master copy of the email resides at the sender, which means it is possible for them to update and revise it. With current SMTP the…

I was just complaining about this problem today. If I'm CCed on an email exchange and 4 or 5 messages go back and forth then the problem is solved, i still have 5 unread measages in my inbox. In reality, I should have zero messages because the problem has been resolved but SMTP doesn't allow for that.

Unless the other participants only think the problem is resolved, and you have some additional knowledge which would be relevant.

Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

#32

Post by fiddly_bits »

graue wrote: post #30
fiddly_bits wrote: post #23

Nothing ambitious was mentioned in that article. And if you want a to-do list you should check out something like trello.com Otherwise, a spiral notebook and a pen is a great deal better than your inbox as a to-do list. --Please feel free to ignore the following email rant.-- Email is a pretty impressive digital translation of the written letter. And for cases where a letter written by hand on paper would work well,…

What did Wave do that addressed email's shortcomings? Any examples? I remember when Wave came out, I couldn't figure out what it actually was or what problem it was trying to solve... it was as vexing to this email user as Haskell's zygohistomorphic prepromorphisms to a Java programmer.

Most of the problems I mentioned: conversations of any length could be read in the normal English left-to-right and top-to-bottom direction, adding someone to a conversation already in progress was easy (as was removing someone), I don't think spam could ever have been as big a problem on Wave as it is in email, changing one's mind and the ability to edit what has been said was trivial in Wave, and it created a single, canonical conversation as opposed to the fusillade of conversation chunks firing back and forth (and multiplying times the number of participants) that we've become so familiar with in email.

Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

#33

Post by rogerbinns »

mongol wrote: post #27
rogerbinns wrote: post #10

So if both sender and recipient are using this, they'll end up demanding increasing classifications from each other in an infinite loop? I think the actual solution will turn out to be something like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000 The important difference is that the master copy of the email resides at the sender, which means it is possible for them to update and revise it. With current SMTP the…

I used to think something along Internet Mail 2000 was good. But it notifies the sender that you read it. I don't like that.

Not necessarily. The recipient systems could automatically access the URL to check for updates - ie no human in the loop. At a minimum it would notify that a system related to the recipient has checked in, but there is no evidence that a human was behind it.

Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

#34

Post by stfu »

BrentOzar wrote: post #3

There used to be a mail provider (EarthLink?) that automatically responded with a message saying I had to click on a link to get my email past their spam filters. I found that infuriating. I can imagine getting one of these automatic responses might cause similar negative reactions - that the person using Inbox Pro is a little bit of a primadonna. Having said that, I still signed up for the beta. Because I'm a primad…

This reminds me on TruTwit, in my opinion on of the most spam'iest services on Twitter. But it is some smart disguise.

Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

#35

Post by samstave »

shurcooL wrote: post #20

Yep. http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/3313/imagekm.png Give more power to benevolent senders. I've had similar thoughts. I don't want to waste other people's time, but the current email protocol forces me to. There is no way to specify if your email is... 1. "Check this out sometime during the week, it's funny stuff, if you have time. You need a 24"+ screen and 10 mins, so don't even look at this email on your phon…

People forget about IM.

For all #1 items, IM the link. It is temporary, and ephemeral.

For all #2 items, email them.

Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

#36

Post by rogerbinns »

sjwright wrote: post #19
rogerbinns wrote: post #10

So if both sender and recipient are using this, they'll end up demanding increasing classifications from each other in an infinite loop? I think the actual solution will turn out to be something like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000 The important difference is that the master copy of the email resides at the sender, which means it is possible for them to update and revise it. With current SMTP the…

> So if both sender and recipient are using this, they'll end up demanding increasing classifications from each other in an infinite loop? Presumably the system would only kick in for threads of discussion initiated by others and not yourself. So if you send an email, any replies to it would behave as normal.

That requires "standards" compliant behaviour which won't happen. Similar issues happened back in the days when people used to respond with "click this link to verify" as ill thought out anti-spam measures. The inboxpro proposal is also vulnerable to backscatter, joe jobs etc.

Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

#37

Post by shawnreilly »

I think this is a great start to solving what has evolved into a real world problem. However, I think that this idea needs to be explored further. As others have indicated, the resulting User Experience for the Sender is not that great. The time investment requirement has shifted from the Receiver to the Sender, which does not really solve the problem. I think a truly elegant solution to this problem will lower the time investment for both the Sender and the Receiver. So with this said, I like the approach, and I think Boris is half way there (with a strong focus on the Receiving End at this point).

If it were my project, I would now brainstorm and focus on how to make the User Experience better on the Sender end. He mentions that he plans to eventually have an iPhone/Android App (aka UI of some sort on the Senders End), which I think is a 'must' in terms of facilitating a good User Experience for the Sender.

Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

#38

Post by MortenK »

Interesting, but might be a hard sell to already email overloaded people now having to categorize outgoing mail. They might now even get an extra auto-reply mail for every mail they send.

There is also a emotional aspect in terms of everybody being told very explicitly that they are not important enough for an immediate reply.

In the worst case, a sender gets a message saying "that email you sent to Tom last week has been auto deleted. You can resubmit and maybe Tom will adress it later". It might be the honest truth, but I can't imagine a lot of people, especially customers or managers, would enjoy such a message.

As mentioned there is interesting elements, but ultimately it seems too engineer oriented and with a bad user experience for senders.

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