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I love this idea, except that the conclusion about something being a moderately bad use of company resources doesn't necessarily follow. The benefits of things like team rapport are hard to quantify, but that doesn't mean they should be dismissed as waste. The same goes for things that certain individuals feel are a waste.

Taking jokes, just one subset of such emails, as an example: For you, a particular joke may be a waste, but having the team culture be such that it is open to jokes, may provide benefits beyond each individual joke.

Still, great idea, and maybe the objections I raise could be overcome just by the right wording.

That is true, but at a very large multinational, I used to recieve over 100 send to all emails a day, and three real ones.

Some of the 'send to all' emails were pretty important, so I had to read them, but a lot of them added nothing, and were sent to 400'000 people. I think each inappropriate global send to all cost $1000+, assuming people disgarded it pretty quickly.

+Low estimate, assuming it takes 1 second to disgard the email, everyone reads it, and gets paid minimum wage.

:) reminds me of the "warning" message that used to appear in "rn" before you posted a message to a usenet group:

This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. You message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.

Ah the old days.....

When I am wistful for particular aspects of the Usenet, the degree of self control exhibited in its threads is clearly not among them. Audience size fueled many a flame war, and reliance on self control by contributors allowed spam to overwhelm most communities.

>You message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere.

Was there a time when this was actually true?

>"Your coworkers spent a total of 36.4 hours reading your message. It cost the company $1458 in employee time. "

This in itself could be a nice plugin for your mail. You need 3 values to be able to calculate it:

* Number of employees the mail will be sent to (hard with aliases, easier with Outlook PDLs)

* Average fully burdened cost of employees (managers should know this, or you can default to something like $120K)

* Estimated time to read (based on wordcount and an average reading speed)

From there you can get the "hours wasted reading this mail" and "cost of this email".

EDIT: You could go above and beyond and use an open rate percentage to more accurately determine the cost, but that's not something an email client could record, it'd be server side.

That's pretty brilliant. Imagine showing an HR department their worthless emails cost the company a million dollars in man hours.

First rule of HR : fire the ones who talk bad about HR. Come to think of it, that's what bad bosses do, too. Oh no, I should add the epiphany that "Enterprises are like Operating Systems in which, by design, the malware has the Highest Priority" to the thread on Epiphanies : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7545284 !

Nice idea but the big problem I can see is that nobody will want to vote their bosses emails as a waste of time. Also in large corporations a lot of long emails will be sent that relate to company policies etc that nobody reads in practice but the purpose of the email is that it protects the company in the event that an employee says they were not aware of policy X.

> Nice idea but the big problem I can see is that nobody will want to vote their bosses emails as a waste of time.

Are you kidding? That's the whole point!

Presumably, the boss allowing it in the first place is a signal that they're interested in this feedback from their employees.

Yes and no, corporate politics is a minefield and often subtle.

I think you have two issues here. The first is that in a larger business there are a significant number of messages that get sent out as a matter of corporate policy that don't get the attention management thinks they should. Quite possibly email is not the best approach to these, but telling management that the email was a waste of time is going to make no friends, especially if there are legal reasons for the announcements.

The second problem is that there are managers who do send out de facto spam and probably could use the feedback.

If the feedback is anonymous, I'd certainly vote my boss's email down.

Well, hopefully your boss does not read HN.

On the other hand, some E-mails are actually not crap and get lost in the waves of mailing list spam and build reports. While we're fixing E-mail, here are a few suggestions that would correct a major problem with E-mail, the ability to miss/ignore it:

1. Non-optional delivery/read receipts Various clients have these, but it would be nice if these were universally supported and could be made non optional. This is useful so that when I don't get a response and have to go hound someone, my first question doesn't always have to be "Hey, did you get that E-mail??"

Speaking of responses...

2. Response required flag Be able to mark an E-mail as requiring a response from a specific recipient. Such E-mails could be presented differently in the recipient's client, highlighted or called out in a different color. Client software could generate a TODO list out of them, issue reminders if the E-mail has been un-replied-to for more than some configurable period of time, etc. The longer the message is ignored, the more annoying the presentation might be. This highlighting could be silenced by either a. replying to the E-mail, or b. clicking an "ignore" button (which also sends notice of the ignore action back to the sender). The sender could also cancel the flag after the message is sent.

3. Response required by date As an enhancement to the above, instead of a flag, a date/time by which a response is needed. This could allow the recipient's client software to display these E-mails in a sane priority order.

I don't think many people would sign on to mandatory read receipts. It'd have to be forced on them by mail provider or employer.

Every single alert I have ever seen through outlook "So-and-so requested a read receipt. Do you want to send it?" has been 100% declined on my part.

I love the idea of getting feedback on what you sent. It took me posting to HN and Reddit to realize how unimportant most things I work on are. It's one of those things that should be obvious but aren't until you are confronted with numbers.

- A variation: to have emails you want to send go in a pending pool moderated by a team of trusted confidants, to avoid sending out email that is a waste of time.

Hopefully not being unnecessarily critical, but I can't see the trusted confidants bit working: 1) They're trusted confidants, probably more likely to a) share your opinions b) support you when they shouldn't 2) The more value your e-mail consumes (i.e. the more people that receive it), the more likely your trusted confidants have expensive time.

I agree trusted confidants is an improvement, but probably not enough on its own.

If the voting doesn't work it should be possible to gather other metrics such as how long the message was visible on the screen - in other words did the recipient actually read the email. Over time it would learn the users typical reading speed. Another would be how long was it sitting in the inbox before it was read. A smart email client can detect when the recipient actually notices that the email is there.

With these metrics it could then work out which members of the company send out the least well received emails. There are certainly some people where I work who have a very low interesting email ratio. These people would be prompted to sort this out.

One risk would be the employee that just sends out jokes would of course appear to be highly effective. Some algorithms would be needed to filter out work vs play emails.

To creep employees out, these metrics could be readily available to management and used in their performance reviews as part of all the other data obtained about them!

Basically, we're now talking about taking the way mailing lists track their impact, and applying it to internal corporate communications.

That would make total sense as a sideline for somebody like mailchimp.

Here's a version of that that we did using our Django app. You create a new email with a unique ID and get a link to vote that you can put somewhere like your email footer. We've posted some of the code here: https://github.com/FlowStacks/email-voting and the email voter is here: https://flowstacks.com/emailvoter/

Great idea and I think this would be awesome as a GMail extension/addon (ala Rapportive). You could even have it only appear for messages from the same work domain.

It'd be absolutely necessary that voting was anonymous.

It's a nice idea but I think it would be a little too burdensome for every single email. Maybe if the mail was going out to >N people where N is configurable by the organization.

I think one of the reasons why no one's ever done this is that with traditional email, it's impossible for the sender to know how many people one email has reached, or will reach. But I think Threadable (recent YC startup) could actually do this.

It might be cool to make it like a neutered spam button. Instead of actually training your mail app to reject it as spam or notify any spam registries it could just function like clicking the "waste" button and cut out the "worthy" button since it is sort of default.

Attent by Seriosity has an interesting solution to this: http://www.seriosity.com/attent.html. They create a scarce currency that companies use internally to send messages.

The broader point this raises is the cost of information exchange, not just corporate email but all valuable content. I can envisage some system attaching cost to information exchange. Kind of like curating through market forces. I suppose it's an extension of what a search engine does. Anyone come across this idea anywhere?

like how Medium displays reading time?

Isn't Gmail Priority Inbox a solution for this use case? I don't use it, but keep an eye out on it's classification efficiency, looks like it does a fine job already.

No, because it doesn't close the feedback loop: It neither encourages good writers to keep writing, nor does it discourage de facto internal spammers.

That's actually brilliant, thanks for sharing!

There is an easy platform for this.

http://ideas.ozonebit.com/

Check it out!