Declaring Email Bankruptcy
avc.com
avc.com
Maybe there is an opportunity here for a web-based solution to this problem. Of course he doesn't want to give someone access to his gmail account. So maybe there's a way to selectively allow someone access to your inbox folder with auditing/logging/organizing features. This way someone else can manage your inbox but not go around snooping for password reset emails.
He's not even getting that much mail, if you count it out he says that 'from the beginning of April to the first week of may' he went from a few hundred to an unmanageable thousand.
That's only about 30 messages per day, if he simply kept up with it it would not be an issue. Once the mountain is high enough it can be very intimidating.
Imagine not washing the dishes for a full month.
edit: changed spam in to mail, the point still stands.
I'm just saying as good as computers/apps have become, a second set of eyes and hands can still make a busy CEO's life easier.
- if it was low, not a big deal
- if it was high, percentage wise not such a big issue
So it would have to be somewhere in the middle, say around the 30 to 60 emails on top of the ones he's already receiving for it to be a 'big deal'. And even that does not seem to me to be an extraordinary high volume.
The thousand backlogged emails is a big deal, that will take you two days at least to get rid of.
But the majority of those probably does not require an answer, and if it hasn't been read in 30 days it probably wasn't very urgent either and you may be able to lose it entirely without it being a big deal.
People should not become a 'slave to their inbox'.
Imagine if you write and respond to e-mail constantly, and you still get 30 more than that, and you've described what Fred lives with. :)
But, it seems like they've really stopped innovating, and it really leaves a lot to be desired. Labs features are nice, but not really game changers.
Gmail's contact management sucks. I have hundreds of contacts in my contacts list from running the Hackers and Founders meetups, and I try really hard to write notes and metadata about each contact after I meet them, but it's really hard to get at those notes from an individual email.
Xobni really has the right idea with this. If I could easily change the display of emails to threaded conversations ala Gmail and easily get the archive feature, I'd make the switch over to Xobni + Outlook in a heart beat.
I'm more than willing to pay $10 -20 a month to someone that can solve this problem for me....
Gmail has good filters, but it does not have bayesian learning (appart from the spam filtering).
That's weird, they use the exact same tech for the spam, why not apply it to the 'good' mail as well?
At that time POPFile+IMAP was not very stable and POPFile would crash often. And also, it was a pain to have a computer running all the time at home only for this.
Then, there was another problem. POPFile would run every two or five minutes, so when I opened Gmail I used to find not yet filtered mails in the inbox.
If you make a webservice that does this right, I will consider using it. Now I'm using Opera Mail, which is very nice, but the training is local and, therefore, I don't have the same filters and training at home and at the office, which is rather painful, sometimes.
I'm sure there is a succesfull business behind this.
Evening project?
Clearly, the not yet filtered bit is a nuisance, that's why you really want it to be built into your mail client.
Yes, the nuisance is there, but I'm sure there is a way to solve it. The good part is that it does not make the service unusable, so, people can start using the service even though with this nuisance.
Release early and then iterate. ;-)
I love this feature.
It is also possible to use POPFile with any client and IMAP server. http://getpopfile.org/
POPFile grew from POP only to lots of other protocols and many, many people still use it.
I would have happily come to Japan and spoken, I've been there before and always loved the place.
Most of our Organizer logic starts with heuristic matches on the From address and other headers in the message, but we're also testing out Bayesian filtering on the message bodies to identify other traits and train the system.
Joshua Baer | @joshuabaer
Jevons Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
I've almost lost control a few times - mostly because of vacations- and I'm certain that I'll hit a tipping point where my time doesn't scale to my inbox size. I couldn't handle my boss' email load, for instance...
Are there any good techniques that scale for dealing with email?
Just for fun I disabled the spam filter on our mailserver for a few minutes a while ago, took me hours to clean up afterwards. The spam volumes are simply unbelievable, but with proper filtering it really isn't that much of a problem. I think I get about 20 to 30 spam messages per day nowadays that somehow make it past the filter. I do update the filter rules with every message that gets through though, usually on subject or body keywords.
Which presumably wouldn't be helped by spam filtering!
But that's only 30 emails per day!! Where do I sign for that?
If you want fewer emails, you need to stop signing up willy-nilly.
I reply to emails usually very quickly (unless I'm sleeping), even if they are a bit more complicated because I know that if I let it slide the 'mountain' will start to look too high to me to.
It's mostly a matter of discipline.
It is as simple as that. Not every email requires and answer. I think 'compulsive answering' is a huge problem with people that have an 'email backlog', they see that not only as email they need to read, but also as if every email requires an answer, and really, not every email does.
If someone asks you questions or mails you a business proposal then yes, an answer is required. But if someone tells you they had a great time somewhere or tells you they are going out for lunch today and won't be in the office between 12 and 2 that does not require an answer.
Even plenty of personal email does not require an answer.
When it comes to dealing with spam, I'm often tempted to change my email address of ten years and start off with a blank slate. I'm genuinely curious to see how long it would take to ramp up. I rarely hand out my [myname]@example.com address, instead using [companyname]@example.com - so, amazon or somedodgywebsite@example.com and then filtering spam depending on that. Is it time to start over?