Startup idea: high-volume email client
The more I think about this, the more I think it's a huge opportunity. I suspect there are a lot of people who are overwhelmed by the amount of email they receive, and even more who could spend a lot less time on it with a little help from their software. I suspect a few news.yc readers fall in to one of those categories. What would make things easier for you? Here are a few of my ideas:
The fundamental problem is prioritization, preferably with a minimal amount of user intervention. Who the mail is from matters, of course. What it's about may matter more. For certain types of mail, the quality of the content matters, but not for others.
I'm envisioning a system built around a probability-based text classifier. Messages could be tagged with multiple categories. Categories would get an importance weight assigned based on user behavior (time between receipt and reading, likleyhood of reply, link click or other action) with an option to manually alter the weight. Some sort of autogenerated search folders would probably be useful too, but I haven't thought about the details yet.
Is anybody else working on this?