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I want to reply

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48 pointsidioterna18 comments

I see my email (Google Apps) as the main point of contact for ME on the Internet. Not my Facebook, not my Twitter, not whatever else. If someone has to send me a file, it goes to my email. If I just met somebody new and we're not at "Facebook friendship level" (a friend of mine's phrase) then they get my email. Email email email.

I'm also perfectly happy to use my email as a notification zone, as it's probably the one place online where I will absolutely definitely 100% receive whatever message I'm sent.

With regards to the emails themselves, I'm actually almost against the kind of personalisation that the author here is recommending. "Hey, Jim, your tweet got retweeted!"

Yes, very impressive, you worked out how to insert a merge field. How could I possibly have known the message was for me if you hadn't put my name at the top there? I suddenly feel so very engaged.

I just think it's a bit disingenuous, almost a little dishonest, to try and pretend that an email update from a company is actually a letter written to you personally by some guy who works at said company.

The yes-please-reply@ address is a nice gimmick, but if you're sending messages to this address and receiving no response then what makes you think anyone's reading them at all?

What I really want is to stop my email inbox from being a notification area. It doesn't feel right for notifications. Foo replied to your post. Bug X has been fixed in project Y. All that stuff doesn't belong in my email inbox.

What I'd really like is a single online notification service. I imagine signing up for a service somewhere, and I just plunk my special notification address somewhere in the settings. The service then communicates to that online notification service instead of sending me emails. I could install an app on my phone and desktop (separately configurable) that alerts me. I can set up filters through the app or a web interface.

I'm not too hopeful about this ever happening though. No service will support it unless it's mainstream, and using the notification service is useless until most services support it. Chicken and the egg.

"What I'd really like is a single online notification service..."

Everything you say about this sounds exactly like hosted email to me. How is it different?

To me, the problem with email is the time it takes to manage it: filter, mark as read, etc. Gmail filters help with this, but it's still work. But I can't see how any notification system could know how I want things filtered without me telling it.

It would be nice if the community would agree on a simple header that indicates "notification" so it's easier to filter automatically.

You can use address tags to sign up for notifications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Address_tags E.g. if your email is username@gmail.com you can sign up for bugfix notifications as username+bugfix@gmail.com which makes inbox filtering much, much easier.

There are three currently defined headers that I can think of: Subject, Comments and Keywords. Personally, I think I would pick Keywords, but that's me.

I just have a filter to tag them and remove them from the inbox. I see no point in having to disparate interfaces and mechanisms that one has to configure and maintain.

This to me is what Google Wave should've been - a plug-in to Gmail that allows notifications as well as free-form discussions involving complex media types.

Perhaps IFTTT (http://ifttt.com/wtf) might be a start towards what you're looking for?

See Notifo: http://blog.notifo.com/notifo

Seems the idea does not sell, the company went bankrupt.

Wait... I don't get this.

The guy has "thousands of unread items in my inbox" that he will never get to.

His priority inbox has 26 unread messages of which only 9 are directed to him (others are mailing list, sent by a machine whatever that means and newsletters).

I presume his "normal inbox" has the same ratio of email "from machines" and directed to him directly since there is no reason to be any other way.

To me this paints a picture of a person who does not take care of his inbox and he wants me to send an email to him? Really? That guy wants to "talk to me" and he wants to get an email from me, presumably so he can write a blog post about having thousands of emails in his inbox? Nope, I don't get it.

> Nobody wants nameless faceless corporations anymore. > And even if they did, email isn’t a flier you send > into a million postboxes, it’s that personal > sales/support/whatever call your humans make.

Derek Sivers / CDBaby has been doing something similar, adjusting the From:-field to include the customer first name: "CDBaby loves Sarah" for shipment confirmations. As reported, people loved this kind of mails (thinking that somebody at CDBaby changed their email profile settings for each outgoing mail :-)

The same philosophy holds true for SMS notifications.

We (Bizen.com) send SMS notifications to our customers. If they respond to the SMS, it is directed to their account manager.

This is a massive challenge, made harder by all the other competing startups. I have been thinking often about offline versus online. For all the effort you do online, one good offline meeting could create much more benefit.

For example, you may have a million twitter followers who create minimal interaction. Or have a face to face meeting with one person who introduces you to an interested angel or your next big customer.

What has biggest impact?

Think of it another way. As a startup getting feedback is your primary tool for improvement.

It shouldn't be a case of offline or online. Do both until you can't. Then start optimising.

I often see organisations cut-off e-mail feedback long before the noise from spammers, auto-replies, vacation mail, etc. becomes an actual issue.

Wait until you have a problem. Then look at the many tools around that can help alleviate those problems. Then think about maybe recruiting more people to help deal with the feedback. Then - if you still have a problem - start thinking about removing communication channels.

It should be the last option - not the first.

If somebody gets so much email they ignore most of it, then they're an outlier. I'd prefer to hear the opinion of somebody who receives a normal amount of email, and what they think of the issue.

The correct pronunciation is 'twenty-twelve', not 'two thousand and twelve'.

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