2,433 Unread Emails Is An Opportunity For An Entrepreneur

I set up an account at emailkarma.com (sadly, taken, by Xobni, no less!) as a recipient. I set a default free karma amount (say, 100) for new senders, a default karma amount for unsigned emails (say, 50), and route all my email through the service. I also set up a whitelist of known good senders with an infinite karma balance.

People who email me for the first time will automatically be issued 100 karma points by the system. They have one of two options:

1. People who don't know about the karma system can email me directly, but their emails will "spend" the default amount for unsigned emails. When their balance reaches zero, their emails get de-emphasized.

2. People who know about the karma system can choose to spend their remaining balance with me by tagging the email subject with [karma: pointvalue]. Unimportant emails can be assigned less value, and if they absolutely need to email me, then they can spend more of their karma.

Incoming emails are sorted by date and by karma spend. I can reward relevance by giving them more points to spend, and/or by setting their default karma spend to a higher value. I can punish stupidity by adjusting karma accordingly. Webmail interface, or a thunderbird plugin, maybe?

Senders can view their karma balance for a given recipient and default spend (both uneditable) by emailing the service to prove identity and signing up.

Arrington, for instance, can reward good tipsters with more karma, and punish PR trolls by slapping them with a karma penalty.

You could apply this to other forms of communication, too-- your facebook/friendfeed, twitter, etc., though those would have to be passive (relevance weighted by karma balance, no discrete spend available per post/recipient).

Older methods of communication like a phone call or in person meeting require the person who initiates the conversation to invest some time in getting what they want from the conversation.

Let's assume that the majority of the emails received are primarily for the sender's benefit (ex. "please tell me what you think about x for my project" "Could you do an interview for y?"). These messages should get the lowest priority and could even be deleted if they can't be answered within a week or two.

The next set of emails are of mutual benefit to the sender and receiver (such as conversations between clients and companies, friends to friends, and productive internal corporate communication).

The final category is emails for the receiver's sole benefit. Automatically generated emails should be in this category, if they are to inform you that your credit card may have been compromised. Most emails here don't require a response from the receiver. Spam and marketing materials do not fall into this category.

Of course in each category you could drill down by priority depending on the situation.

As for Mike A, I presume a huge inbox is party because he's running a huge and growing business, and has leveraged himself to the max. In that sense, it's no bad thing.

I don't want to lose a key e-mail from someone new (e.g. a prospect) or someone I want to reconnect with (e.g. an old friend) in the midst of everything else

I want to have some answers suggested based on a collection of blog posts, a FAQ, or some other knowledge repository.

I want to recombine a number of e-mails into a complex branching thread because that's a work flow that a team I am a member of embraces (see http://www.43folders.com/2008/03/12/patterns-email-conversat... ) so that I have the full context for the conversation.

I want to make sure I don't lose touch with folks I have had a prior shared success with (I would like to boost my effective dunbar number).

There are several others. Please feel free to contact me directly if you would like to continue the conversation. I think this is one area that is overdue for a significant change in paradigm, the evidence that the current approach isn't scaling can be found in a variety of secondary and tertiary coping behaviors that we have come to accept without attacking the root cause. I think there will be many approaches that continue to use SMTP as a transport protocol but enhance the user interface with embedded analytics and automation, as well as adding alternative forms of response to include blogging, wikis, IM, and VoIP.

see also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143878

He'd probably be getting 400 emails a day if he didn't force people to resend anything they expected him to read.

This is one of the great things about Twitter. Nowhere is there a "x twitters unread" on the site. You simply dip in and out as you wish.

Someone (not me) could create a control data base of say 2,433 emails. The data base could be downloadable.

Whoever feels like it could work on their solution and in x weeks or so post either a url for their new app, a proposal, or even a report based on the data. The rest of us could vote just as we normally do and the top 3 contestants could compete for the top prize of ________.

(I may be onto something, but my creativity is waning. A little help please. Any ideas?)

Sometimes, it's the tool user, not the tool itself, that is to blame.