A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
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A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
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Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#2IMHO there is something valuable here.
One of the problems with emails is that the sender don't understand what is happening to the receiver in terms of added work to perform, so this adds the feedback needed to the system.
About the "expire" feature, it is a lot of time I think gmail should have something like that. "Sorry this email remained in the user inbox for N days, the user was not able to reply so please send it again if it is important, or make it shorter and easier to reply for the user by improving it".
Btw I'm part of the problem as I tend to write very long emails. That's the issue. Emails should be short, and conceived so that the sender will have an easy time to reply something meaningful using a small fraction of his/her time.
That's probably more of a cultural problem than a technological one. However when I realized email was going to kill my productivity I stopped replying to most of the messages that hit my inbox.
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#3There 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 primadonna.
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#4Where on the queue do auto response messages from other inboxes protected by Frighteningly Ambitious Queue system messages land?
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#5There 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…
You can do this with 'Boxtrapper' on CPanel, or, I believe, with SpamAssassin
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#6Sounds like he reinvented email as a standard "ticket system" complete with queues and auto-responses.
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#7Perhaps I missed it, but what is the implementation? Is it a web interface which reads gmail? Is it a web-based email @inboxpro.com? I can see a lot of benefit to the features listed, but I can see a big target market where the individual has no choice over mail provider, namely an enterprise exchange host.
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#8I think that most emails (probably all human relationships) can be described by the "who needs this more - sender or recipient?" paradigm (in the parlance of Seinfeld - who has the hand). An example - if a subordinate is emailing his boss, the subordinate needs the boss to read & respond.
This solution would seem to work in cases when the recipient has the power in the relationship. But what about the other X% when he's the underling? Wouldn't the cost of pissing off those individuals outweigh the benefit of increased productivity?
In other words - it can probably work for Bill Gates, but not for the rest of us.
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#9There 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…
However I think inbox pro plans to camouflage the link by using an app where the second step will hopefully provide a better user experience. More like an email delivered notification.
Re: A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
#10So 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 moment send is hit, the message is gone which is why band aids like this inboxpro approach exist.
For example I could imagine adding a header to emails that gives a canonical url for it and some cryptographic information as well as the original body. If the recipient is using regular SMTP and mail clients then things remain as today. If they are using the new system then the recipient client can make requests for updates, give queue time information, ask for tagging etc and automatically reflect those changes in what it shows.