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Feature ideas for email programs
10 feature ideas for email clients: nice to see some provocative ideas to start a conversation on the topic. I've long felt that email programs are missing key features (as I wrote a couple of years ago in Bit Literacy).
Best idea in the list above is "create an Auto Filter button" - essentially, make it easier to create mail filters - a chore even on the better-designed clients out there.
One philosophical difference I have is the idea that the email program should be more intelligent and filter things without us knowing how, when, or why it happens. No thanks. People talk about "net neutrality" (which I support) - what about "email neutrality"? The human being should be in full control of the filtering of incoming emails. (There should be automated filters in place, but the human should create or at least explicitly approve each one.)
One glaring omission is any mention of tracking. How many emails have come in, and how many have I sent, in the past day/week/etc.? Even more importantly, how many days this month have I gotten to an empty inbox at least once during that day?
Another omission: the key key key insight that email management is tied to todo management. Which speaks to the importance of a bit-literate todo list like Gootodo.
Thanks to Nick Bilton for starting off the conversation - much needed. Anyone else have ideas for features for a bit-literate email client?
I'm with you, Mark. If my email program hides 99 messages I won't care about, but then hides 1 message that I really need to see, the technology is a burden, not a benefit.
As someone who spends almost every day working to make Outlook smarter, I think it's gonna be a long time before we have a 99% hit rate on any automatic filtering system. We can barely even hit that with spam!
There are a lot of startups out there working to better integrate the to-do list and the inbox - ClearContext and Liase come to mind.
Have you ever looked at Chandler. It was meant to be a new task oriented take on the email client. But it never seems to have taken off. My interpretation is that change is just too difficult for people. I've tried to wean people off their Outlook before and the resistance is incredible.
Mark -
First, a disclaimer: I'm Customer Experience Manager for Gist and it's my job to try to both delight customers and listen to them when they say that our service and applications aren't quite what they need them to be.
Second, a comment: Thanks for continuing this debate on email and what we can do generally to make it more successful. My personal view is that email solutions need to be more intelligent, work wherever you are, and be dead easy to configure.
At Gist I think we've nailed the first two -- we're working on ways to add importance and relevance to email, and we are on several platforms to make access easy -- but we need some help from your readers to become truly easy to use and configure.
Adding tracking for email, allowing the user to create a call for action or behavioral trigger, incorporating GTD or "To-Do" features, and providing additional intelligence to the system are all things we're thinking about. The core goal is to speed the time it takes for you to gain critical insight from your email (and from the other news about your contacts in social networks and other communications).
Thanks, and looking forward to hearing other comments.
Regards,
Greg Meyer
Customer Experience Manager, Gist
http://www.twitter.com/GregAtGist
The spell checker isn't working in the New Mail, Yahoo has been contacted via Chat and suggests switching to the Classic Mail for now, on the mail screen click Options, then click Switch to Classic Mail on the drop down.
http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=2290126
I agree -- I actually wrote a series of posts on how I think Outlook could be improved.
The main problem is that the focus is all wrong IMHO. It's not about the email, but about time management, and seeing email as just one point of entry for stuff we have to do ("time demands.")
When the focus shifts, then the question becomes: "How do programs help users to process the time demands that are buried in email messages? What should happen after an email is read?"
A few options include:
- deleting it
- storing it in a folder (the more automatically the better)
- placing the essential piece in a todo list
- placing the essential piece in the calendar
The point is that Outlook is an email program that grew into a time management program - by adding features - and it never developed a time management philosophy of its own. This is critical to good design -- I'm looking at the 2010 version to see if anyone gets it... but don't think so yet.
As for the other programs out there, if they think only in terms of ToDo's (as suggested by GTD and others) they'll miss the boat. ToDo's aren't as important if the calendar is used well - a skill that's becoming easier with more mobility and slowly improving designs.
IMHO!
Oh -- and I also agree about the glaring admission. I liked xobni initially because it gave some preliminary stats on email use but had to kill it when it slowed my pc to a crawl (it's upgrade time again.)
This problem is related to the one I mentioned above -- email is simply not the point... time management is, and there are a host of statistics that could be collected with the user that would tell him/her how well they are doing the fundamentals of email/time management.
I like the examples given and would add in:
- avge time email spends in inbox
- longest time an email spent in inbox
- % of items converted to calendar tasks (or placed in todo list)
- avge vol of email per day
- % in inbox that escape spam filter
- % in spam filter that are mistakenly routed there
etc.
@Francis Wade -
"The point is that Outlook is an email program that grew into a time management program"
Yeppers.
"...and it never developed a time management philosophy of its own."
Amen and amen!
Truer words were never spoken. Er, written.