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Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

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Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#21

Post by alooPotato »

adventured wrote: post #14
alooPotato wrote: post #5

One thing stood out to me in the article "make something free and easy and people will do a lot of it". What about this as a potential solution - in order to send an email to someone, you have to pay something. Here's how it could work: 1) You sign up for a service that autoresponds to all incoming email stating that in order to send this receiver an email, they require at least X BTC. 2) The receivers inbox only sho…

You just complicated email by adding money and monetary transactions to it. This approach would also do a horrible disservice to the roughly 6.7+ billion people with not much money; it assumes someone's communications are to be judged primarily by how much money they have or whether they have bitcoins, rather than the value of what they have to say. Making communication over the Internet more expensive (when the oppo…

Attaching BTC to an email is akin to the sender attaching an "importance" score to the email - with the benefit that the sender doesn't like as much because it costs them money.

The receiver can still setup rules - i.e. if the sender is in my family or team at work, don't require the BTC attachment. You could set it up so that it was only for strangers emailing you. Your spam filter would still be in place.

Its a way to pay to get a quicker response or more attention - kind of like advertising.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#23

Post by sixQuarks »

Email must be looked at as a "stream of information". No longer are you required to read, respond, or organize everything.

The best thing is to archive everything once per week and forget about all the unread emails. If it's really important, the sender will be in touch again.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#24

Post by thatthatis »

Why do we still have forced ordering by arrival time?

When I sort my physical mail, I put it into piles and order those piles by importance. When I sort my email, I can't.

In my physical mail I can choose the importance order and ad to the queues as I wish. With email, not so much.

I want a gmail plugin that lets me order my inbox in order of priority.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#25

Post by bane »

thatthatis wrote: post #24

Why do we still have forced ordering by arrival time? When I sort my physical mail, I put it into piles and order those piles by importance. When I sort my email, I can't. In my physical mail I can choose the importance order and ad to the queues as I wish. With email, not so much. I want a gmail plugin that lets me order my inbox in order of priority.

> When I sort my physical mail, I put it into piles and order those piles by importance. When I sort my email, I can't.

That's almost entirely a comment on how lousy the state of modern email clients is.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#27

Post by jiggy2011 »

thatthatis wrote: post #24

Why do we still have forced ordering by arrival time? When I sort my physical mail, I put it into piles and order those piles by importance. When I sort my email, I can't. In my physical mail I can choose the importance order and ad to the queues as I wish. With email, not so much. I want a gmail plugin that lets me order my inbox in order of priority.

Outlook has let you do this for years, you can set various flags on mail items, you can also do this for mail you send so that it will automatically flag for the recipient.

The problem of course is that if you allow the sender to specify the importance of an email they will flag things that are important to them,not necessarily important to you.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#28

Post by hu_me »

thatthatis wrote: post #24

Why do we still have forced ordering by arrival time? When I sort my physical mail, I put it into piles and order those piles by importance. When I sort my email, I can't. In my physical mail I can choose the importance order and ad to the queues as I wish. With email, not so much. I want a gmail plugin that lets me order my inbox in order of priority.

gmail looks like to be on this path already except instead of allowing you to queue messages its trying algos to manage it for you. (Priority inbox / email tabs)

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#29

Post by jedberg »

thatthatis wrote: post #24

Why do we still have forced ordering by arrival time? When I sort my physical mail, I put it into piles and order those piles by importance. When I sort my email, I can't. In my physical mail I can choose the importance order and ad to the queues as I wish. With email, not so much. I want a gmail plugin that lets me order my inbox in order of priority.

Gmail has a feature called priority inbox -- it does almost exactly what you want. Within the priority section it is still sorted by time, not by priority.

I've always wanted an inbox that sorted purely on priority.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#30

Post by jiggy2011 »

I'm curious as to why so many people end up in the email hell, I can understand if you are a senior person at a large company or some sort of public figure/minor celebrity.

I just run a decent spam filter and ruthlessly unsubscribe from all commercial newsletters. Things from mailing lists are auto-filtered into folders and almost everything that's left is stuff that is pertinent to projects I am involved with so it's stuff I need to read. On a busy day when I'm working on 2 or 3 projects I might get 20 emails.

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