Some Thoughts On Email After Dealing With 500 Emails | Hacker News Reader

Some Thoughts On Email After Dealing With 500 Emails

avc.com

38 pointsprakash15 comments

I'm reposting my comment from Fred's blog here:

I've always wondered if a "tweetdeck interface for email" would make sense. Basic column for white listed important people, add columns for filters (search terms, groups of people,etc.) and other parameters. People can write longer emails, but the form factor enforces things to be shorter when they can. Integrate in some simple plugins for media sharing (pictures, video, large doc attachments). It would also know when notifications came in from facebook,twitter,etc. since each service usually uses a certain email address. This is my killer email app. If someone builds it, name your price, and ill be your first customer.

"Gmail knows who these people are and I can't for the life of me understand why they don't build a tool to source up all of those emails automatically. Please build that feature google."

I think PB said they had built it, but they never released it because they couldn't figure out the right UI.

Indeed, he just referenced it this weekend in his Wave review: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/11/so-i-finally-tried-...

Seems like the simplest way to implement this would be to add an option in the address book that says 'Automatically apply Label XYZ to this person's incoming messages' (but with less words than that).

Or a filter option for the 'From:' box that says 'In my address book' or something like that.

While slightly cumbersome, I think you can create a folder for specific people and then apply a filter to have those e-mails go directly to those folders.

I guess that's something Xobni's already done, but only for Outlook. Would they make something for Gmail?

    8) Gmail is life changing. Thank you google.

I am also a gmail fan-boy. It makes me crazy to see otherwise intelligent and tech-savvy people use yahoo mail or hotmail. You know who you are. It's almost as painful to me as seeing somebody use IE instead of FF.

I'm transitioning my sister, by allowing her to pop3 it into her MS Outlook, which is how I got started. Then the day came when I just quit firing up Outlook.

It's not that easy to switch email providers when you have 10+ years of history. I have Yahooo and Gmail accounts, but all my old friends keep sending emails to Yahoo.

Gmail has an feature where it will pull over the contacts and mails from your Yahoo account, and tag them with a label:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=m...

Migrating contacts isn't the problem. The problem is people keep emailing me at my Yahoo address even when I give them my Gmail address.

No problem, you can let gmail fetch emails of any pop3 or imap account. This is what I do with my university email account.

I know. I feel for you. I actually purchased the paid Yahoo account for my wife, so we could pop3 her yahoo over to gmail. (they only allow the pop3 access for paid accounts).

I like how he says that brevity != disinterest. I wish this understanding was the norm instead of having to be pointed out.

I let the rest build up in my inbox and try to get to it on the weekends.

seems to directly conflict with

4) I like to have conversations via email.

this would be like trying to converse with someone over postal mail, except it might even be faster to mail this guy a letter than wait for him to reply next weekend to your email.

I think this plays into the theme that there is a lot of room for people to be more concise in all forms of communication - especially email.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com