Smarter Email

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:42:00 +0000

I love Email.

It just works. It works because it is flexible, open, and anyone can use it. It works very well in heterogeneous environments as the email standard is well documented, accepted and implemented.

I have looked at a ton of ‘solutions’ that try to replace emails, but nothing really works as seamlessly as good-old email.

The goal of email is to enable communication and think that it can be improved. It will be stupid to completely replace this amazing means of communication, when it fundamentally works well. What needs to be done is to make it ‘smarter’.

What's broken is not the ability of emails to enable communication, but that the forms of communication have now become more complicated whereas email is still at its original design built for person-to-person messaging. Because email worked for everything, everything piled onto it making it complicated.

What needs to happen is that a standard should be created on top of email, that can handle ‘special’ use cases which can then be implemented by clients in a cross-platform way.

A few examples of this are:

Messages from discussion groups can be similar to RSS feeds. They are usually read-only and rarely need to be responded to.
Special handlers to 'automatic' messages, like calendar invites, flight alerts, shipping confirmation, etc. They don't need to be shown like a 'message', just need to get to my mailbox so that I can access them if I need to.
Notification emails should show up as, well, notifications.
A good way to handle things like groupons, which, even though come in as email, aren't really messages.

There is no one company that can 'fix' this, as any change to email needs to be standardized. However, small steps can definitely be taken to create email formats that are 'machine readable' by the client so they can be organized properly.

A first step in this direction is to have a major email provider (eg. gmail) to start supporting ‘smart email’ formats. This will make the services to send emails compatible with this format, which can then grow and expand to more and more services.

I would love to see some work done here, and see someone solve this problem. May be its time for someone to start a new email company :)

Comments

None (February 15, 2012):

This is 100% spot on. I’ve thought about this a great deal in the past, and discussed it with some folks.

Thing is, you don’t even need a new standard, since the mechanism is already there. All we would need is for folks to agree (that may be harder) on the use of standardized x-headers. Then clients can implement “smart” filtering, etc based on the presence and value of them.

For example (none of these should be considered well-thought-out ;-) x-from-company = Netflix Can be used to filter on company

x-is-billing = True Can be used to route to a folder of bills

x-period = Monthly Can be used to determine subscription or periodic freq

If you put all those together, you can create a folder for my Netflix account statements and highlight it when a bill is near or past due. You could allow a search fo all bills this month. You could do quite a lot.

Dwipal (February 15, 2012):

Yes, that is exactly what I am talking about! All the pieces to do this are already in place, people just need to agree on it.

Aniket (February 15, 2012):

Didnt Wave try to re-invent email - and faced a lot of inertia from users? Didnt reach critical mass. Although I understand what you are proposing is quite different from Wave’s propositions - but the case in point is that people (users at large) shed inertia really slowly - or just dont.

GMail labs also from time to time have some interesting little featurettes. For example - they mark email that is addressed directly to you as important; etc… I believe that such flexibility is best left to individual users to tune their mailboxes to their preferences (rather than standardize). Folders and (perhaps smarter) filters serve the purpose in most cases.

Dwipal (February 15, 2012):

Wave tried to replace email with something very clunky. It didn’t really reduce the ’noise’ of email, or add a good structure to it. Rather, it was really noisy. It also tried to do too much.. like editing documents, which is not meant for doing inside of email.

Jalpesh (February 18, 2012):

On similar lines, may be write extensions for desktop clients like outlook. show interests in people using it and hopefully one of the companies will add this in their apps. I see more and more web mails are mimicking desktop app functionality (apart from their own unique features) to move desktop features on thinner client. I think it’s difficult for gmail or Microsoft or yahoo to make these standards esp because they have to interoperate

VIM 7.3 with Persistent Undo

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 17:43:00 +0000

VIM 7.3 recently got released, and supports persistent undo!

This post describes a simple way to configure it. You have to compile it / get it from unstable repo, but totally worth it :)

Enjoy!

Software I Use...

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 04:08:00 +0000

General Software

Chrome (Primary Browser), Firefox 4 (Looks quite good)
Digsby IM
Postbox Email Client
OpenPandora
Paint.NET
Audacity
TightVNC
VLC Media Player

Online Services

LastPass password manager
Pinboard.in
paper.li

Development Tools

SecureCRT
WinSCP
Quick HTML Color Picker
NoMachine
Eclipse
S3 Browser

Peaceful easy feeling

Sun, 20 May 2007 06:19:00 +0000

Nowadays, there is no time for anything. It just seems that you have spent a lot of time staying very busy, but there is nothing done. One reason for this is when there are a lot of things to do, you get excited and don’t get anything done. As a result of this, you loose ‘peace’ and always feel stressed out. There are tons of books/ideas on how to manage your time, but here are some easy things that will get some peace in life:

Take a good lunch break, and eat slowly. Eating fast is not only unhealthy, but also keeps the brain busy. Taking a nice short break with a change of pace during lunch will revitalize the mind and get it ready for all the work coming up.
Read a book. In this speed-age, we have gotten used to getting information fast and lost patience. Reading a book not just for the heck of reading it, but for enjoying the text helps relax.
Listen to music (and not in background). Just chilling for a while, listening to some music that you like will help relax too. Make sure that the computer is not on, and you are not doing anything else but listening to music, though.
Sleep. Sometimes, this is just what you need to relax. If you have been very busy, having a few extra hours of sleep is really helpful.
Go for a walk. This is not for exercise and weight loss. Just taking a brisk walk in the park is quite helpful.
Talk to some far-away friends. Not only this helps you stay in touch with them, it also feels good to talk with them and definitely gives a break from the current jargon of thoughts that could cause stress.
Watch a movie. Sometimes, there is no time even for movies, so this will make you find atleast 3 hours of good relaxing time.