Email needs to be realtime | Hacker News Reader

Email needs to be realtime

sachin.posterous.com

81 pointsssclafani52 comments

There's a hierarchy of immediacy for communication methods:

* Cell Phone: Make me drop everything and talk to you

* Desk Phone: If I'm free, I'll talk to you

* IM, SMS: Maybe I'm jammed and I can't reply right this second, but I'll take a look and get back ASAP. For what it's worth, Bloomberg messaging falls into this category.

* Email: Give me a couple hours and I'll write a thoughtful response

* Physical letters: Probably something important that you need to keep a hardcopy of. Expect a response in a couple days.

Email has a very nice niche that's as much a consequence of social convention as it is of the protocol. If email became realtime and people expected responses within 30 seconds or even 5 minutes, it would lose much of its value.

Excellent comment and great point.

Email was, is and will be popular in days to come just because it's not realtime. We have many other forms of realtime communication (both verbal and written), and yet, email managed to survive throughout all these years.

Not to mention the part where it's not designed for realtime. If you want realtime, just use IMs.

While I generally agree, in my experience extremely few cell phone calls require the immediacy implied by them.

I'd love a screening system: "press 1 to make my phone ring", otherwise straight to voicemail where I'll also get informed via Voice -> Email if I don't check it sooner.

There is a good bit in Tim Ferriss's "4 Hour Work Week" where his voicemail tells people to email him, and he will only check his email once per day, in the morning, IIRC.

Yeah, Google Voice should add that feature. Or you could build it pretty easily with Twilio.

Google Voice does come with call screening: http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

Which I've used, but it's a PITA rather than any real aid, especially w/o an Android phone. It also slows down and mildly annoys anyone who is calling you (maybe not a bad thing, but certainly not the same thing). And it's only really useful for people not in your contacts list, which is probably significantly less than 1/2 if you're not using it for work.

Plus, anyone not annoyed enough will still make your phone ring every time they call, demanding attention now to at least see who called. But I could do that before, with caller ID.

You could build a small app to do this with twillio. Patrick did:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/12/29/twilio-phone-call-web-ap...

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/15/deploying-sinatra-on-ubu...

By realtime the autor means that it would pop up like an IM/SMS. I'm not so sure I'm convinced that emails popping up like IMs is a good idea.

I have nothing wrong with getting my emails faster, and I'm sure it would benefit a lot of people, but personally I don't want email to be realtime in the way that IMs or texting is. More importantly, I don't want anyone who emails me to expect it to be realtime.

When I want that kind of availability I have phone-availability and instant-message (be it phone-based or PC based). I'd rather keep email to important-yet-not-time-sensitive things.

If email were "realtime," I would have some kind of expectation coming from the people that want to use it in such a way, thereby beguiling me into constantly letting it be checked (by it alerting me).

Even if I don't allow it to pop up on my device I would still have to explain to each new contact that email for me does not mean an instantaneous read and reply.

Some of my friends get cranky when I don't answer their IMs instantly, I think it would be a bit of a pain if people treated email with the same expectations of responsiveness.

That reminds me of my old boss expecting email to be the same as an answered phone call. There was a problem in our system that he wanted me and a co-worker to solve by working late and he sent us a both an email. The was close to the end of the day. I didn't read the email until the next morning. He yelled at me for not putting in the extra effort and leaving it to my co-worker. The really funny part was that his office was only 20 steps away from my desk and he could have dialed a four digit number to reach my desk phone. And this was back in 1994.

There is a HR joke about mail. He send a mail request not relevant and the first one to answer is fired because it means this guy is not realy busy.

Every part of your description makes it sound like an awful place to work. I don't get why people who happen to have the job of "manager" assume they have the right to yell at people. It's not remotely professional and certainly doesn't have the intended effect.

I know someone who puts a warning in her .sig file: “I do not read my email every day, or even every other day.” I assume she was fed up with people who sent her an email question and then bugged her an hour later asking her when she would respond.

> By realtime the autor means that it would pop up like an IM/SMS. I'm not so sure I'm convinced that emails popping up like IMs is a good idea.

Exactly. I think the ideal situation would be for IM and SMS be integrated (or just have one win out) and for your IM/SMS messanger be integrated into your email inbox. Then, have an option to be either "available" or "not available" for IM/SMS. IM/SMSs sent when you're not available would show up like email in an inbox.

This is basically what google is doing with gmail and gchat. The only problem right now is that I can't do gchat on my cell phone. Also, the SMS/IM standard has to be as open as the email standard, where I can contact everyone.

Skype chat on the iPhone is like this(though sometimes delayed based on load I guess) and for the most part fast to send you push notifications. With the backgrounding it is available for a few hours of inactivity before needing to re login.

Edit: wow the ipad messed up my sentence.

I agree. Most information doesn't need to be learned in realtime, just made available in realtime. If you need data, you should be able to find it. If you don't need it, it shouldn't command your valuable attention.

Email lets each participant manage their attention according to their priorities. If you're arm-deep in refactoring a class hierarchy, you don't want me to call, especially if I just want to blather about hockey. Email also feels more scalable than instant messenger - I asynchronously communicate with more than a dozen people every few hours with email, but IMing or texting starts to feel overwhelming at n >= 5

Outlook does something similar to this out of the box, notifications in the lower right corner of the window. It is a focus-killer.

Different strokes for different folks, but one of the most frequent pieces of productivity advice I've seen given is "disable the notification when new email arrives." Checking your email on a regular, infrequent schedule lets you establish flow and get work done in between getting work pushed at you.

Um, I think the author needs a blackberry. Most businesses use them.

That being said, the last thing I need is to be more connected to anything other than the location and persons that are within a five foot radius to me at any given time.

"I want emails to popup on my phone just like SMS does."

My first thought was, "Really? I would hate that." But I think it could be great as long as there is an easy way to limit the notifications to only show emails from certain people, with certain labels, etc.

The idea of arriving at a restaurant and emailing my friends to ask where they are is appealing, because it's a move in the direction of a single communication address for a person. I don't like needing to store both a phone number and an email address for someone. How FaceTime for the new iPhone places calls is nice for this reason as well.

Emailing them to find out where they are? Your respective phones should have determined that you're meeting each other due to a calendar meeting, shared your locations, notified you that the other person is half a mile away and will arrive in 10 minutes and told the other person that you've already arrived and are waiting.

Interesting idea, but that would be too much of an invasion of privacy for my taste. It's one thing to tell someone where you are when they call (or email), but a completely different thing for your phone to update someone on your exact location just because you're meeting with them.

True, but meeting events can have optional parameters. Location sharing could be added.

[x] Share my location with other attendees during this event.

Push email has been around for years [1], in particular MS Exchange has been push based for as long as I can remember. I honestly can't see how it's a beneficial thing either. I find pretty much every single push service to be extremely distracting. Sure IM has its benefits, it's a great way to communicate with your dev team throughout the day. It's also an unbelievably huge distraction. Turn off your push based services and I can just about guarantee a productivity boost.

[1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_e-mail

Push email dates to 4.0BSD (or so the man page for 'biff' tells me):

http://www.unix.com/man-page/freebsd/1/biff/

I dunno my email seems realtime enough. I get growl notifications with new email and freak out if there's a red dot with a number in it on my iphone mail app.

Heck I had to turn off the vibration or sound notifications of new email on my phone because of the sheer volume.

I guess I kind of disagree - Email can be as "realtime" as you need it to be and IM/SMS seems to take care of the rest in my book.

As I see it, the real power of email comes from the inherent queuing nature - it allows you to decouple your schedule from demands of others.

Being "realtime", especially if the senders have the expectation that the message is realtime, means necessarily losing that queuing nature which greatly diminishes email's flexibility and resilience.

The biggest problem with realtime is that you _need_ to implement some sort of access control, or otherwise you'll be inundated and overwhelmed with messages. If we turn email to realtime, we'll necessarily need to build the access control (or some sort of super filter) into it, and that basically shuts down the open nature of email. You can argue that open email is good (emailing Steve Jobs) or bad (spams) but it _is_ something that has real value.

I want emails to popup on my phone just like SMS does. And I want to be able to quickly reply just like SMS.

I would love to see someone write a better email application for the iphone that does push notifications, quick replies, smart threading, etc.

Uh, get a Droid phone? Mine does all of this.

Email is great because everyone can use the protocol in the way they want to. If you really want real-time email, it can be built.

I'd prefer not to open that box, it took me years of fortifying my gmail filter defenses, playing around with Tim Ferriss style auto-responders, and using 3 sentenc.es before I found Inbox Zero zen.

Realtime e-mail could be great for certain purposes such as customer service, but I hope that it never become the personal norm.

Low-latency email carrying is awesomely variable. It's asynchronous, and I can reply quickly if I want to. If I don't want to (such as if a fast response is more a waste of time, or encouraging unnecessary queries), I can hold off for an hour or two without annoying most people.

I've been accused of turning email into instance-messaging, if the email service is low-latency enough. GMail's typical turnaround for me is under a minute, sometimes under 30 seconds, if the response doesn't need to be extensive. (It usually doesn't.)

Thanks to presence notification and expectation of synchronous communication, IM tends to be very synchronous, and almost as draining and disruptive as phone calls.

Not sure I agree with Sachin. If I want people to be in touch real time, I give them my mobile so he or she can text me. Otherwise, I'm looking for less emailed noise, not more.

Yet, if the discussion is strictly that of the protocol's limitations, not sure it would hurt to ensure more immediate delivery, but I agree with the other commenters that IM seems to float the boat. Not sure I've ever heard anyone complain that IM isn't fast enough for them. Perhaps the discussion should be about a migration of IM to a shared, open standard, as opposed the silos of Gchat/jabber, Skype, AIM, FB chat, etc.

It is called Google Wave. Oh wait...

Google Wave was ahead of its time. I'm sure Wave or something similar will show up and prove to be useful maybe five years from now.

I don't even know why it would take that long... I, and I think many others, would love an opt-in, light-weight, "simple collaborative documents" side channel in the gmail interface (with the option to push a document over to the full gdocs interface) should be doable for them as of about yesterday or the month before. Apparently the larger public needs baby steps on this sort of thing, but lots of us don't.

What he’s really arguing for is a new medium, like SMS that works on more than just cellphones, not faster email.

As anyone could tell you, push email is far too disruptive.

Qmail (quick mail, if you allow me to co-opt the term) would be text-only and as "push" as possible. It would be Bad Manners to qmail someone something that is not as urgent as an SMS, something better sent by email.

I don't think that's what he wants.

Email needs to be left alone.

I found that my productivity went up when I turned the frequency of my e-mail delivery down. Now, it's set at 30 minutes between checks.

This way, e-mails pile up a little bit and I can easily filter through them rather then feel like I need to respond to every one. Don't get me wrong, I still reply to every e-mail but I've found that a lot of stuff solves itself in 30 minutes.

The best part is that short of phone calls and IM, I'm left alone to focus on what I need to get done and the natural 30 min patterns of focus seem to refresh my train of thought and I think help improve my focus.

Rather then real-time, I say try turning up the delivery time for a while. You might be surprised!

Email _is_ realtime.

IMAP IDLE does exactly this - push email. I get email on my phone as soon as it arrives at the server. Sadly, the email app on Android doesn't do this out of the box, but the K9 email app does it perfectly well.

Email has many many advantages over SMS. To the point where my girlfriend and I usually email each other using our phones rather than SMSing. (An Android G1 with 10 minute IMAP polls, and an iPhone with push).

if email is to become the medium for instant messages and "phone call" messages, some things will have to change.

if someone phones me (or sends an SMS), they know they'll reach me right now because my mobile phone is always on.

if someone sends me an IM, they hope to reach me now, but waiting is acceptable, because i might not be at a computer or my IM client isn't running.

if those two are to work via email, i'd need a second address that acts like a phone number. people trying to reach me on that address can expect to get through right now. of course, if you abuse that privilege, you end up on my killfile and i'll only notice your messages later.

IM-style communication would run on the old email address. when i'm online/available, you can probably chat with me in realtime. if i'm not available right now, i won't even know about the new messages right away, but i'll get to it later.

there were several occasions when i was emailing back and forth with someone within minutes. seamlessly turning that into a chat session would be awesome, but email still doesn't have sub-second delivery times and email clients still display emails like big, important letters and not like lines of a chat session. i think there can be an UI that looks good for both chat sessions (many small messages) and emails (few large messages).

It's not entirely what the author is describing, but these days e-mail delivery [via Gmail IMAP for me] is essentially instant already. The rest is just UI alert notifications.

Speaking of, Greylisting (using SMTP 451 to verify a sending server is standards-compliant) needs to speed up. Most servers' retry time is waaayyyy too long.

disagree here--just yesterday i turned off "fetch data" on the iPhone because being alerted each time i got an email becomes quickly annoying and distracting.

try having your server tell the senders mail server to resend the email in X minutes. a pretty nice spam killing technique but it costs time. you can white list them after they get through the first time so the following emails don't have that artificial delay.

What this guy describes is the stuff RIM is selling years before the iPhone;

I did not finish, the sentence....

What this guy describes is the stuff RIM is selling years before the iPhone; form over function sindrome?

If your job is mostly concerned with coordinating with other people, then this is correct, the more realtime the better. However, if mail merely supports your work, then realtime mail is unnecessary and, indeed, quite unhelpful. The great thing about email (compared to, say, the telephone) is that it works well for both cases.

Has the guy ever heard about IRC?

Probably, but what does that have to do with his point? I doubt he wants to force other people to change their habits so that he can get information faster.

> I doubt he wants to force other people to change their habits so that he can get information faster.

I think that's exactly what he's going for. Why else would you make email "realtime".

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