A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email | Hacker News Reader

A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

thenextweb.com

143 pointszeedotme86 comments

So if both sender and recipient are using this, they'll end up demanding increasing classifications from each other in an infinite loop?

I think the actual solution will turn out to be something like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000

The important difference is that the master copy of the email resides at the sender, which means it is possible for them to update and revise it. With current SMTP the moment send is hit, the message is gone which is why band aids like this inboxpro approach exist.

For example I could imagine adding a header to emails that gives a canonical url for it and some cryptographic information as well as the original body. If the recipient is using regular SMTP and mail clients then things remain as today. If they are using the new system then the recipient client can make requests for updates, give queue time information, ask for tagging etc and automatically reflect those changes in what it shows.

I was just complaining about this problem today. If I'm CCed on an email exchange and 4 or 5 messages go back and forth then the problem is solved, i still have 5 unread measages in my inbox. In reality, I should have zero messages because the problem has been resolved but SMTP doesn't allow for that.

Unless the other participants only think the problem is resolved, and you have some additional knowledge which would be relevant.

The problem with this approach is that it leads to everyone reading every email just in case they might have some relevant insight. I see this at my current job - there's a strong "just cc the whole team" attitude which leads to a frustrating quantity of irrelevant email.

Related to this is a common corporate problem where someone has a problem they perceive as somewhat urgent. They often send a message to several people, hoping to get the first possible answer. Sometimes the recipients experience diffusion of responsibility and no one answers, because each believes someone else is better able (or less busy).

There are systems with retraction capabilities for senders (e.g. Bloomberg MSG, though it is no competitor on price). But I haven't seen anything like a system which would downgrade messages already seen by others, etc.

Usually I have zero interest in most of the "E-Mail 2.0" hype that springs up every couple months, but I do actually really like the idea of taking dynamic content a step or two further. I think email is fundamentally good at its intended purpose, but I could see things like revisions fitting in comfortably with the existing paradigm.

> but I could see things like revisions fitting in comfortably with the existing paradigm.

But then why call it frighteningly ambitious or ambitious at all?

I wasn't the one who called it that. I don't know that I want "frighteningly ambitious" in my email anyway.

Anyway, I'm always more impressed by people who can do great things within the confines of established procedure. It isn't nearly as hard to differentiate when you start from scratch.

My mistake, I should have worded the rhetoric better.

I implied for the title of the post (given by OP) being opposite to what impressive is within confines of established procedure. No?

I used to think something along Internet Mail 2000 was good. But it notifies the sender that you read it. I don't like that.

Not necessarily. The recipient systems could automatically access the URL to check for updates - ie no human in the loop. At a minimum it would notify that a system related to the recipient has checked in, but there is no evidence that a human was behind it.

> So if both sender and recipient are using this, they'll end up demanding increasing classifications from each other in an infinite loop?

Presumably the system would only kick in for threads of discussion initiated by others and not yourself. So if you send an email, any replies to it would behave as normal.

That requires "standards" compliant behaviour which won't happen. Similar issues happened back in the days when people used to respond with "click this link to verify" as ill thought out anti-spam measures. The inboxpro proposal is also vulnerable to backscatter, joe jobs etc.

A comment that I feel very strongly about. First, let me say the primary thesis of adding structure (and asking your senders to add structure on their own) is a great idea. My email inbox took a quantum leap when I simply structured all emails into one of two types: 1) emails from people I care about and need to respond to quickly + emails from people I don't know. 2) Everything else, including all newsletters, email lists, etc.

However, I have to strongly object to the expired emails feature. The worst part about being an entrepreneur are the people that never reply back. Not a yes. Not a no. Rejection I can handle. But the people who stop responding or never responded create a lot of heartburn in my life. And the same goes for trying to maintain a social life. Having an acquaintance or new friend never respond to an invite for coffee or a beer is incredibly frustrating.

Any system that would increase the number of emails that go unresponded to is a bad system.

How about instead, you reply by saying "too busy right now, maybe check back with me in 6 weeks?" I've found that cuts down dramatically on the number of unwanted requests. People that really care will check back. Others won't. And you can always escalate the rejection from there.

You will receive a response:

> The email will disappear into the ‘Expired’ box and the sender will receive a friendly notification that they can move it back to the queue, change it to a different format, or delete it altogether and maybe just give me a call

I saw that, and the point stands. I don't think an message basically telling someone their email was ignored is helpful. The existence of this feature could lead to a lot more emails being ignored, or even worse, lead to it being more socially acceptable to ignore someone's email, no matter how nicely written.

> ... none of these solutions try to stop stuff from arriving in the first place...

While I don't agree with this particular "frighteningly ambitious" take on the issue I do agree with that the above quote represents an issue that needs solving. In my opinion, forcing the sender to conform their email to a format of your choosing simply isn't scalable. The reason email is so well used today is because it's so simple to use. This adds a layer of complexity to the people trying to communicate with you that I think would just lead to fewer people attempting to communicate with you (which could in fact be what you want).

I've spent some time building my own "frighteningly ambitious" solution (I'm actually planing on doing a Show HN on Monday or Tuesday). Essentially, the idea is that right now it's the people emailing you that control your inbox. Our solution is to give users control over when and from whom they receive email. It puts you in actual control over you inbox for the first time. For those interested check out https://lightermail.com. Would love to get your opinion.

The kind of email talked about by the OP, will not be for everybody -- it will be for those who get a lot of email and who have a large amount of social capital.

And frankly if you want to contact them, this kind of velvet rope is precisely what they want.

A recent problem I ran into was sending Xmas cards to friends and family. We had over a hundred addresses to send to and I didn't want to send them all by hand. So, I wrote a script. Of course, most of the emails went straight into the spam folders because, I guess, doing this just made them look like spam to most filters.

Granted, the emails were all sent from a shared hosting account, the mail server of which I had no control over as far as certificates and reputation were concerned. But my feeling is that anything I could have done to improve my Xmas greetings' success rate would have been exactly what spammers also try to do.

Aggressive filters assume everyone is a bad actor until proven otherwise, and I think that's a problem. Our quality of life is degraded whenever we make this calculation.

What about using BCC? The email will reach multiple recipients, but none will know about the others.

My script wrote an individual email to every recipient in my list; so none of them knew about the others anyway. I speculate that the email servers that received them, particularly the larger service providers, might have seen multiple copies going to different addresses, noticed that the emails were identical, and assumed they were spam. Usually, a pretty good rule for a filter. But in my case, not so much.

There used to be a mail provider (EarthLink?) that automatically responded with a message saying I had to click on a link to get my email past their spam filters. I found that infuriating. I can imagine getting one of these automatic responses might cause similar negative reactions - that the person using Inbox Pro is a little bit of a primadonna.

Having said that, I still signed up for the beta. Because I'm a primadonna.

This system by itself can be frustrating... as the problem is that they tend to challenge-response everyone.

I would love to see a system that does automatic spam classification (like gmail), but if you get auto-classified as spam, then you get the challenge-response, as a last ditch effort to get through the spam filter.

That would make it too easy to game the spam system, because now the spammer knows they've been classified as spam, and can keep changing the message until it gets through.

This is why it's generally bad practice to reply to an email telling the sender it is spam.

Well, possibly, though spam is a pretty high volume game, and my guess is it's not worth the time for the mass spammers to analyze a few rejects (even if those rejects even do go to their actual address)

It depends on what you prioritize. I prioritize avoiding false-positives, so my spam filter of choice reflects that.

My current spam system (spamstopshere.com) does return bounce/reject messages depending on what filter the email triggers.

You're wrong. Spammers actively try to monitor their success rates and game the filters.

As for the original idea, backscatter is to be avoided at all costs. Nobody likes bounce messages and so forth for mail they never sent. Much better to reject mail at SMTP time, than generate backscatter to the alleged envelope sender after the fact.

So how would you prioritize avoiding false positives without backscatter?

I get a lot of spam, so manually reading a spam folder is not a feasible solution.

Graylisting is more or less this, but instead of a human receiving a challenge, the outbound server receives a "please try again later" (which is enough to stop a lot of spam already).

Earthlink still does this, at least for some of their customers. It's particularly annoying to be asked to verify your address so that the prima donna on the other side will get their order confirmation or tracking number, and given how many services send automated mail like this from no-reply addresses I'm not even sure how these people shop online. It's a relic from the age before Bayesian spam filters.

However I think inbox pro plans to camouflage the link by using an app where the second step will hopefully provide a better user experience. More like an email delivered notification.

This reminds me on TruTwit, in my opinion on of the most spam'iest services on Twitter. But it is some smart disguise.

You can do this with 'Boxtrapper' on CPanel, or, I believe, with SpamAssassin

This is an interesting way to coax contextual metadata from senders. However, for certain senders I will always respond promptly and thoughtfully, regardless of message formatting. Senders such as friends, family, clients, etc. Which makes the auto-reply a bit tricky:

Thank you "motherpowers" for sending the email titled "Happy Birthday" to "leepowers". For a faster response time please re-formulate your birthday greeting as a series of yes/no questions and re-send.

So being able to whitelist senders would be a requirement.

My dream is that in a few months I will open my Inbox Pro app in the morning and answer 20 Yes/No questions using just my left thumb...

I'm not sure what this would accomplish. Reading and comprehending email is not difficult. The difficult part is thinking through an inquiry and responding intelligently. "Can we move up the launch date a week?" This is a yes/no question that anyone can understand. But actually exploring an answer to this question can require considerable mental effort. There's very little utility in having this message display in a slightly different format with a checkbox.

Well, some people already give friends and family, at least, a different email address entirely. ("Personal email" vs. "work email".) The system as described seems more useful for the "work" version.

Then again, it doesn't fully accommodate the way I use my work email, personally. I'm on a number of mailing lists at work where I don't personally respond to most of the email --- but I read a lot of them anyway, in part to keep abreast of what's going on, and in part to be able to exercise my own judgment about whether I should jump in. That's an awkward fit for a workflow that assumes that every email calls for some kind of response.

The 'Yes/no' reply button has an option to add one tweet length of text. So my answer might be "No - but ask me again next week as I have time then". It also has a "This is not a yes/no question" button which allows me to invite the sender to reclassify the question.

Nothing ambitious was mentioned in that article. And if you want a to-do list you should check out something like trello.com Otherwise, a spiral notebook and a pen is a great deal better than your inbox as a to-do list.

--Please feel free to ignore the following email rant.--

Email is a pretty impressive digital translation of the written letter. And for cases where a letter written by hand on paper would work well, email works even better. As long as by better you mean faster and without paper or stamps or penmanship. The SMTP protocol is over 30 years old and still going strong; that's pretty amazing. But email kind of sucks, too.

Frankly, most people aren't good at writing letters. Simply creating a meaningful subject line is difficult. And keeping a conversation germane to the stated subject is also difficult; folks often talk about multiple topics in a typical conversation. To review long conversations, one must read awkwardly from bottom to top, opposite normal English reading direction. Adding someone to a conversation in progress is also awkward. Sending another message (a correction or addition to your last message) before the person (or people) you're talking with replies creates confusion as a reply can only be made to one or the other message, dropping parts of the conversation. Attachments can be problematic. Clearly, spam the likes of which we see today was never anticipated by SMTP's authors, and neither has anyone come up with an especially successful solution to it. We've all just come to accept spam as part of the background noise, filtering the polluted stream, rather than removing the decomposing carcasses from the upstream source.

Creating an alternative that addresses its shortcomings would be ambitious. And I think many people were frightened by Wave, which addressed many of email's shortcomings but was disruptive in the way so many people like to claim they admire but will almost always shun in practice (kind of like how folks always claim to love to root for the underdog, unless it's Haiti). I'm not saying Wave was perfect, but it had great potential. And as far as genuinely ambitious attempts at improving email (or the kind of conversing we typically do with email), I can't think of another example.

What did Wave do that addressed email's shortcomings? Any examples? I remember when Wave came out, I couldn't figure out what it actually was or what problem it was trying to solve... it was as vexing to this email user as Haskell's zygohistomorphic prepromorphisms to a Java programmer.

Most of the problems I mentioned: conversations of any length could be read in the normal English left-to-right and top-to-bottom direction, adding someone to a conversation already in progress was easy (as was removing someone), I don't think spam could ever have been as big a problem on Wave as it is in email, changing one's mind and the ability to edit what has been said was trivial in Wave, and it created a single, canonical conversation as opposed to the fusillade of conversation chunks firing back and forth (and multiplying times the number of participants) that we've become so familiar with in email.

I think email is the ultimate form of bad skeumorphism. It was designed to mimic postal mail. Email addresses, no permissions, no true id checks, no punishment for abuse. Many of the now used features like spam folders, filters, encryption, receipts were just tacked on (poorly). And because it's a "worldwide standard" that no one controls it's impossible for someone with a vision to try and change email.

I say abandon "fixing email" and come up with a new solution altogether. Start with a clean slate. Form a coop or nonprofit foundation that will control the standard for 5-10 years until everything's ironed out, then release the source code so people and providers can use it to replace email and people don't have to depend on one group of people. At this point I'm willing to try anything, as I'm sick of email, I HATE it with every fiber of my being. Spam and delayed newsletter bombing is taking up hours of my time each week.

This is my position exactly. And skeumorphism wasn't even in my vocabulary (until now, thanks!). The example I tend to compare email to is the general design of early electric lights: so many of them simply looked like gas lamps into which an electric bulb had been jammed. Like these: http://goo.gl/808F6 Sure they're pretty, but over time, we've designed much better electric lights by moving away from the restrictions imposed by an open flame. Email, on the other hand, hasn't evolved much at all since its birth in 1982 (!), and better filters simply don't impress me anymore.

And the cost in bandwidth and wasted time email and its spam problem impose on us cannot be understated. We really do need something new.

Email became unwieldy when it became a universal communication mechanism. Sending email does not mimic a very important characteristic of post, sending email is free. All abuse would stop if people were required to place a paid-for 'stamp' on each email they sent. Failing that, email will only be replaced by something else that people want to use en-masse, facebook messaging probably.

The idea that you could come up with an alternative messaging solution is beyond silly. Why would people use it? Any migration would require both systems to run in parallel but unless the new system incorporated every feature of the current email infrastructure people would simply not bother. And if it incorporated every feature then the abuse would migrate over too.

You mean something like facebook messages?

Probably something like this?: https://bubbleideas.com

Better skeumorphism of mail? Sure, like refactor and split mail from postage parts completely? Chris, can we connect with you over email? (the irony, ha!)

[Disclosure: I work for the project linked above.]

Does that project have a bug bubble?

Handled? I just connected with you up there.

  If you let a coder (or, *shudder*, a user) specify the importance of her alert,
  give her a little pull-down menu that has choices ranging from "nice to know" to
  "white-hot urgent," and nine times out of ten, she'll choose "NOW NOW NOW
  URGENT ZOMGWEREALLGONNADIE!"

- Cory Doctorow, Epoch

I tried it out by sending him an email.

Interestingly enough, the average response time for a yes/no question is by far the longest (5 days vs 3 days for a long email).

Shouldn't responding to simple yes/no be much faster than reading a long message?

Still in closed beta so the stats are based on all my test mails. As I keep a bunch of them in Yes/No to play with sorting this screws up the current stats. Should be more reliable when actively used…

Interesting, but might be a hard sell to already email overloaded people now having to categorize outgoing mail. They might now even get an extra auto-reply mail for every mail they send.

There is also a emotional aspect in terms of everybody being told very explicitly that they are not important enough for an immediate reply.

In the worst case, a sender gets a message saying "that email you sent to Tom last week has been auto deleted. You can resubmit and maybe Tom will adress it later". It might be the honest truth, but I can't imagine a lot of people, especially customers or managers, would enjoy such a message.

As mentioned there is interesting elements, but ultimately it seems too engineer oriented and with a bad user experience for senders.

IMHO there is something valuable here.

One of the problems with emails is that the sender don't understand what is happening to the receiver in terms of added work to perform, so this adds the feedback needed to the system.

About the "expire" feature, it is a lot of time I think gmail should have something like that. "Sorry this email remained in the user inbox for N days, the user was not able to reply so please send it again if it is important, or make it shorter and easier to reply for the user by improving it".

Btw I'm part of the problem as I tend to write very long emails. That's the issue. Emails should be short, and conceived so that the sender will have an easy time to reply something meaningful using a small fraction of his/her time.

That's probably more of a cultural problem than a technological one. However when I realized email was going to kill my productivity I stopped replying to most of the messages that hit my inbox.

> Btw I'm part of the problem as I tend to write very long emails. That's the issue. Emails should be short

I wonder if this could be useful here.

http://www.telescopictext.com/ (Context: https://twitter.com/rgherrmann/status/300311324905324545)

It would definitely have to be automatically generated to be viable, as in no more effort than to write a normal long email. But doing that automatically is a hard problem.

"These are all tools to sort and file more stuff, but none of these solutions try to stop stuff from arriving in the first place. Or to find the email you really want to receive between all the other stuff."

Hmmm...I use gmail to filter stuff I don't really need to read right away ("filter messages like this"), and priority inbox is specifically to find the email you really want to read between all of the other stuff. Why straw-man the competition?

In any case, there is definitely room for email "types" (tags, labels, etc.) that can be implemented in custom x-headers and then get added to the right inbox/queue.

The communication back to the sender is an interesting thing though. If the sender is using something like this, and they autorespond...

I do not thing email is broken, nor do I think it's a todo list. In fact it's my favorite part of the internet. But y'all go ahead.

Totally agree. Email works perfectly fine for me. For private purposes as well as for my job. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I don't see anything that's broken or that would require fixing.

Email doesn't scale well is the problem. The people complaining are those people who get a lot of email. I fall in the cateory and constantly struggle with it.

Ultimately I think the real solution is a personal assistant.

In saying 'email doesn't scale well' I think you're really saying 'I don't scale well' (as you hint in mentioning a personal assistant) - in reality the problem is that email scales so well as a flexible and quick communication medium that people simply can't keep up - if you used any other form of communicating with these people who want some of your time (telephone, face-to-face etc) it would be even more cumbersome. Is it even possible to give a slice of your time to hundreds of people a day and still lead a productive and happy life? Should we try, or should we cut down the number of people we give this privileged access to? Our time is finite after all, and reading or answering email from people we don't know is not necessarily a good use of it.

Another approach to the problem of huge volumes of mail is to classify your senders at the point of contact by giving them different email addresses. That lets you check one mail address frequently (for close and valuable contacts only), and one email address every few days (for casual contacts, website contact, mailing lists etc), and only give out the important email to those whom you trust to use it appropriately (i.e. never publish it). This helps considerably to cut down volume which you see every day.

Email's strength is that it is a distributed free-form medium which can contain any sort of content. Trying to enforce structuring content with simplistic templates like this is just wasting the sender's time instead of yours - why give them the email address in the first place if you don't have time to read and respond properly? Why not have a web form which imposes structure and emails you the result, or an FAQ on a website?

While I agree there are huge problems with email as it stands, I'd say they're more to do with identity and sufficiently sophisticated semantic processing of incoming mail for those who receive a lot of it, not with the structure of email itself (which is admirably simple and has served remarkably well), or lack of hints as to contents (NB any such hints in the control of senders will be abused mercilessly by spammers).

Our time is finite after all, and reading or answering email from people we don't know is not necessarily a good use of it

If this were true, the solution would be dead simple - stop reading email.

The problem is that not all email is created equally. There are some emails that are incredibly important and most that are not. The problem is that it's impossible to sort it ahead of time.

Where on the queue do auto response messages from other inboxes protected by Frighteningly Ambitious Queue system messages land?

The first thing I thought of when I read this title was Paul Graham's essay about startup ideas. I'm glad the title succeeded in that sense, as it's relevant to this article.

More to the point, I like this idea. I like that it focuses on the perspective of those who send you emails. I feel that many people trying to solve this idea would look to changing how inboxes handle messages or look to changing the user interface of email systems.

But instead, this solution actually helps reduce email by responding to senders. That's a unique approach. Very out of the box.

But it's true that it's "frighteningly ambitious" to try and tackle this problem on the sender's side. I could see this failing if the majority of senders are the type to simply send off an email and not check for a while, which would ignore the automated message query. However, if a majority of users do pay attention to it, they can edit their email options and hopefully make life easier for the receiver.

Excellent idea. I hope it develops into a full startup.

The addition that I think would make it scalable and worthwhile is to establish an interoperability standard via mail headers. Broadcast you're using this system with X-UsesMailTickets so that compatible clients can pre-fill their emails with "X-MailTicketType: Yes/No", etc.

In addition to the header, the content can be in a mime/alternative so compliant readers can display it.

I'll make a note of that. Sounds very cool and useable…

Sounds like he reinvented email as a standard "ticket system" complete with queues and auto-responses.

Spot on!

I 'invented' it… :-)

I think that most emails (probably all human relationships) can be described by the "who needs this more - sender or recipient?" paradigm (in the parlance of Seinfeld - who has the hand). An example - if a subordinate is emailing his boss, the subordinate needs the boss to read & respond.

This solution would seem to work in cases when the recipient has the power in the relationship. But what about the other X% when he's the underling? Wouldn't the cost of pissing off those individuals outweigh the benefit of increased productivity?

In other words - it can probably work for Bill Gates, but not for the rest of us.

I think even Bill Gates would appreciate the extra info and know he can expect an email from me within 3 days. Then imagine his surprise when I reply within an hour.

In fact, that is what I did with every investor and journalist that emailed me. I replied to most within minutes.

This is a push notification system - it turns the recipient's problem into the sender's. This is fine if communicating across a hierarchy or for a public address. It could be obnoxious, however, with peers, particularly those outside tech.

Consider, instead, a pull notification system. The first time a sender emails the recipient they are sent a link (also in the recipient's signature) to a page providing expected response times for various email forms along with the option to convert your already-sent email into a short-response form, e.g. yes/no.

> The first time a sender emails the recipient they are sent a link (also in the recipient's signature) to a page providing expected response times for various email forms along with the option to convert your already-sent email into a short-response form, e.g. yes/no.

This is pretty much what Inbox Pro already does, no? I tested it by sending an email, and got an automated response:

> Hi [my name],

> Your email is #85 in Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten's inbox. You can __optimize your message__ so it will be easier to answer.

Clicking the link leads to a webpage showing average response times for Yes/No questions (5 days), Short questions (I think 14 hours?), Long questions (3 days), and FYIs (3 days). I converted my message into an FYI and submitted it.

I think the only difference in what you proposed is your version limits it to "the first time a sender emails the recipient", while this system would presumably give the same treatment to future emails from me.

> it turns the recipient's problem into the sender's.

I've read about a very similar phenomena over at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy.

"One way this might be implemented is by charging senders a small fee per e-mail sent, often referred to as a "Sender Bond." It might be close to free for an advertiser to send a single e-mail message to a single recipient, but sending that same e-mail to 1000 recipients would cost him 1000 times as much. A 2002 experiment with this kind of usage-based e-mail pricing found that it caused senders to spend more effort targeting their messages to recipients who would find them relevant, thus shifting the cost of deciding whether a given e-mail message is relevant from the recipient to the sender (Kraut 2002)."

I doubt a day goes by without someone embarking on an email replacement. No doubt there are many things that could be improved but I've always felt that viewing email as a todo list is symptomatic of the reactive mindset that generates a lot of stress.

In many work environments email is used to shuttle the responsibility for tasks between people. We've all felt that relief on sending an email. You feel like you've performed a valuable task, made some progress in work that may have very few visible milestones. As the recipient we tend to take the same view and feel as if each email adds to our list of work. Some imaginary clock starts ticking when you receive the email and stops only when you reply.

I think the first thing you need to do is remove the implied hand-over that comes with and email. Remind yourself that just because the sender sent an email, it doesn't mean you must do anything about it. Take a step back and think about what it is you need to achieve and then look to your email to support those activities.

I think this is a great start to solving what has evolved into a real world problem. However, I think that this idea needs to be explored further. As others have indicated, the resulting User Experience for the Sender is not that great. The time investment requirement has shifted from the Receiver to the Sender, which does not really solve the problem. I think a truly elegant solution to this problem will lower the time investment for both the Sender and the Receiver. So with this said, I like the approach, and I think Boris is half way there (with a strong focus on the Receiving End at this point).

If it were my project, I would now brainstorm and focus on how to make the User Experience better on the Sender end. He mentions that he plans to eventually have an iPhone/Android App (aka UI of some sort on the Senders End), which I think is a 'must' in terms of facilitating a good User Experience for the Sender.

Yep.

http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/3313/imagekm.png

Give more power to benevolent senders. I've had similar thoughts.

I don't want to waste other people's time, but the current email protocol forces me to. There is no way to specify if your email is...

1. "Check this out sometime during the week, it's funny stuff, if you have time. You need a 24"+ screen and 10 mins, so don't even look at this email on your phone"

2. "I NEED A REPLY ASAP, ARE YOU THERE?"

It appears as a (1) on your phone and I have no power over that to make things easier for the recipient... (other than perhaps send an email at a specific time which is less likely to interrupt your work)

Your first one is way to specific to be signaled by some kind of flags, the recipient might as well just read the subject line of your email if its well written.

But basically every e-mail client implements some kind of Priority/Importance header, that solves your problem. Nobody uses it though, and the few times someone decides to set "high priority" it might be in their opinion but not in mine. A more complex system won't see more adoption.

People forget about IM.

For all #1 items, IM the link. It is temporary, and ephemeral.

For all #2 items, email them.

But which IM? Gmail chat? Facebook PM? Twitter DM? MSN? AIM? Skype? iMessage?

Really? Because if I want a quick response, I normally get better luck with a messenger.

I believe one reason people like instant messaging is that with IM you are kind of constantly having a converstation. It is very much ok to skip the "handshake" and go directly to point. "Lunch 12:30?" "Yes".

Email clients could offer instant messaging style interface for this kind of messages. Instead of seeing list of subjects, then selecting a message etc you would directly see the actual question and just answer it.

I feel like Mailbox (that new iPhone app) provides EXACTLY this, except in a much more elegant package. Email as a to-do list is pretty brilliant.

Perhaps I missed it, but what is the implementation? Is it a web interface which reads gmail? Is it a web-based email @inboxpro.com? I can see a lot of benefit to the features listed, but I can see a big target market where the individual has no choice over mail provider, namely an enterprise exchange host.

The left 25% of the page is useless, and has a flashing corporate logo, FFS! The page is also setup so I can't zoom the page. If your site design is crippled for tablet users, to the point I'm forced to use "Reader," this is an interesting symptom and datapoint, but not one I'm sure you'd like.

Odd. What tablet? We specifically designed the site with mobile/tablet readers in mind. Also, what was flashing? If it's an ad, then we need to have it pulled. We don't allow that.

Screenshots to brad@thenextweb.com would be greatly appreciated. This is definitely not the experience we want you to have on our site.

> Odd. What tablet?

iPad 3. I think, what it is, is that the grey sidebar had your "TNW" logo with some fancy left-to-right fade-in effect, which cycled around again and again while it was caching data. Not meant to be a flash, but that's what it amounted to. Now, it just stays grey until it loads. Thanks for changing that.

Still annoyingly takes up 25% of the screen and doesn't let me zoom.

An alternate way is to just abandon email altogether. See, for example, the #noemail movement:

http://prezi.com/w5if2h-bcbcd/ncsu-noemail-why-you-couldshou...

I'm sorry but I just don't get it. I receive A LOT of email every day. Most of it is for day-to-day business and the rest is personal. When I receive an email I either archive it immediately or leave it because it represents something I should follow up on. Yes, some percentage of my day is triage-ing email, that's not a big deal. Email is just a box of messages and it works AWESOME. Everyone has it, it's UBIQUITOUS. Good luck replacing it. Email hate is the symptom, not the cause.

This isn't a new inbox or a new email. It's a personal assistant designed with the constraints of software in mind, similar to harmonia.io. Maybe you'll get the Four Hour Work Week folks to buy in. Good job!

I love this idea. I would love to play around with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com