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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

#81

Post by fiddly_bits »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #53

I think email is the ultimate form of bad skeumorphism. It was designed to mimic postal mail. Email addresses, no permissions, no true id checks, no punishment for abuse. Many of the now used features like spam folders, filters, encryption, receipts were just tacked on (poorly). And because it's a "worldwide standard" that no one controls it's impossible for someone with a vision to try and change email. I say abando…

This is my position exactly. And skeumorphism wasn't even in my vocabulary (until now, thanks!). The example I tend to compare email to is the general design of early electric lights: so many of them simply looked like gas lamps into which an electric bulb had been jammed. Like these: http://goo.gl/808F6 Sure they're pretty, but over time, we've designed much better electric lights by moving away from the restrictions imposed by an open flame. Email, on the other hand, hasn't evolved much at all since its birth in 1982 (!), and better filters simply don't impress me anymore.

And the cost in bandwidth and wasted time email and its spam problem impose on us cannot be understated. We really do need something new.

Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

#82

Post by fiddly_bits »

lobotryas wrote: post #80
fiddly_bits wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A recent problem I ran into was sending Xmas cards to friends and family. We had over a hundred addresses to send to and I didn't want to send them all by hand. So, I wrote a script. Of course, most of the emails went straight into the spam folders because, I guess, doing this just made them look like spam to most filters. Granted, the emails were all sent from a shared hosting account, the mail server of which I had…

What about using BCC? The email will reach multiple recipients, but none will know about the others.

My script wrote an individual email to every recipient in my list; so none of them knew about the others anyway. I speculate that the email servers that received them, particularly the larger service providers, might have seen multiple copies going to different addresses, noticed that the emails were identical, and assumed they were spam. Usually, a pretty good rule for a filter. But in my case, not so much.

Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

#83

Post by emillon »

arn wrote: post #15
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 system by itself can be frustrating... as the problem is that they tend to challenge-response everyone. I would love to see a system that does automatic spam classification (like gmail), but if you get auto-classified as spam, then you get the challenge-response, as a last ditch effort to get through the spam filter.

Graylisting is more or less this, but instead of a human receiving a challenge, the outbound server receives a "please try again later" (which is enough to stop a lot of spam already).

Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

#84

Post by arn »

grey-area wrote: post #62
arn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email doesn't scale well is the problem. The people complaining are those people who get a lot of email. I fall in the cateory and constantly struggle with it. Ultimately I think the real solution is a personal assistant.

In saying 'email doesn't scale well' I think you're really saying 'I don't scale well' (as you hint in mentioning a personal assistant) - in reality the problem is that email scales so well as a flexible and quick communication medium that people simply can't keep up - if you used any other form of communicating with these people who want some of your time (telephone, face-to-face etc) it would be even more cumbersom…

Our time is finite after all, and reading or answering email from people we don't know is not necessarily a good use of it

If this were true, the solution would be dead simple - stop reading email.

The problem is that not all email is created equally. There are some emails that are incredibly important and most that are not. The problem is that it's impossible to sort it ahead of time.

Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

#85

Post by Toenex »

I doubt a day goes by without someone embarking on an email replacement. No doubt there are many things that could be improved but I've always felt that viewing email as a todo list is symptomatic of the reactive mindset that generates a lot of stress.

In many work environments email is used to shuttle the responsibility for tasks between people. We've all felt that relief on sending an email. You feel like you've performed a valuable task, made some progress in work that may have very few visible milestones. As the recipient we tend to take the same view and feel as if each email adds to our list of work. Some imaginary clock starts ticking when you receive the email and stops only when you reply.

I think the first thing you need to do is remove the implied hand-over that comes with and email. Remind yourself that just because the sender sent an email, it doesn't mean you must do anything about it. Take a step back and think about what it is you need to achieve and then look to your email to support those activities.

Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

#87

Post by stcredzero »

bradmccarty wrote: post #77
stcredzero wrote: post #76

The left 25% of the page is useless, and has a flashing corporate logo, FFS! The page is also setup so I can't zoom the page. If your site design is crippled for tablet users, to the point I'm forced to use "Reader," this is an interesting symptom and datapoint, but not one I'm sure you'd like.

Odd. What tablet? We specifically designed the site with mobile/tablet readers in mind. Also, what was flashing? If it's an ad, then we need to have it pulled. We don't allow that. Screenshots to brad@thenextweb.com would be greatly appreciated. This is definitely not the experience we want you to have on our site.

> Odd. What tablet?

iPad 3. I think, what it is, is that the grey sidebar had your "TNW" logo with some fancy left-to-right fade-in effect, which cycled around again and again while it was caching data. Not meant to be a flash, but that's what it amounted to. Now, it just stays grey until it loads. Thanks for changing that.

Still annoyingly takes up 25% of the screen and doesn't let me zoom.

Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

#88

Post by adastra »

lowboy wrote: post #50
adastra wrote: post #44

A comment that I feel very strongly about. First, let me say the primary thesis of adding structure (and asking your senders to add structure on their own) is a great idea. My email inbox took a quantum leap when I simply structured all emails into one of two types: 1) emails from people I care about and need to respond to quickly + emails from people I don't know. 2) Everything else, including all newsletters, email…

You will receive a response: > The email will disappear into the ‘Expired’ box and the sender will receive a friendly notification that they can move it back to the queue, change it to a different format, or delete it altogether and maybe just give me a call

I saw that, and the point stands. I don't think an message basically telling someone their email was ignored is helpful. The existence of this feature could lead to a lot more emails being ignored, or even worse, lead to it being more socially acceptable to ignore someone's email, no matter how nicely written.
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