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Comment by msellout | Hacker News Reader

Why is "defer" different from "snooze"? Both indicate picking a time to deal with the email.

"defer" is more corporate-speaky

"Snooze" to me implies delaying for a unit of time that you may choose to repeat. From their description of "Defer" it seems you pick a specific date/time and add it to your calendar.

Defer seems to ambiguously capture both snooze and delegate.

Defer only means to put off until later. There's no delegate meaning.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/defer

2nd definition further down has this:

verb (used without object), deferred, deferring. 1. to yield respectfully in judgment or opinion (usually followed by to): We all defer to him in these matters.

OK I agree that's closer to delegate, while not the same. You couldn't substitute 'delegate' into that sentence, for example.

Defer forces you to book a time in your calendar instead of "snoozing" the message just so that it reappears later. Actually, snoozing was one of the most exciting features I saw in Mailbox, but after using it heavily I realised I get plenty of messages on Monday morning back to inbox and I just snooze them again. It turned to be a complete disappointment for me

How about making "defer" be snooze with a hard limit of 2 or 3 times max? This I think would work because you could snooze if really you cant/dont want to deal with a message immediately but eventually you would have to.

Or maybe have up to X "snooze slots" so that you cant snooze everything and you snooze things that truly dont deserve to be deleted. And you would have to empty a slot by dealing with a snoozed message to be able to snooze a new one.

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