
A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email - zeedotme
http://thenextweb.com/voice/2013/02/08/inboxpro-com-structured-communications/
======
rogerbinns
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.

~~~
MichaelApproved
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.

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

~~~
caboteria
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.

------
adastra
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.

~~~
lowboy
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

~~~
adastra
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.

------
Maascamp
> _... 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.

~~~
fiddly_bits
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.

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

~~~
fiddly_bits
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.

------
BrentOzar
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.

~~~
arn
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.

~~~
jedberg
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.

~~~
arn
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.

~~~
thrownaway2424
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.

~~~
arn
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.

------
leepowers
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.

~~~
rst
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.

------
fiddly_bits
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.

~~~
graue
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.

~~~
fiddly_bits
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.

------
ChrisNorstrom
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.

~~~
meric
You mean something like facebook messages?

~~~
monsterix
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.]

~~~
tomjen3
Does that project have a bug bubble?

~~~
monsterix
Handled? I just connected with you up there.

------
quarterto

      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_

------
RaphiePS
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?

~~~
borisvvz
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…

------
MortenK
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.

------
antirez
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.

~~~
shurcooL
> _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.

------
mattmcknight
"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...

------
nonamegiven
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.

~~~
gst
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.

~~~
arn
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.

~~~
grey-area
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).

~~~
arn
_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.

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

------
dylangs1030
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.

------
ianterrell
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.

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

------
ams6110
Sounds like he reinvented email as a standard "ticket system" complete with
queues and auto-responses.

~~~
borisvvz
Spot on!

I 'invented' it… :-)

------
omonra
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.

~~~
borisvvz
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.

------
JumpCrisscross
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.

~~~
graue
> _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.

------
Toenex
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.

------
shawnreilly
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.

------
shurcooL
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)

~~~
samstave
People forget about IM.

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

For all #2 items, email them.

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

------
jpalomaki
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.

------
ericmsimons
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.

------
l1ghtm4n
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.

------
stcredzero
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.

~~~
bradmccarty
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.

~~~
stcredzero
_> 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.

------
recardona
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...](http://prezi.com/w5if2h-bcbcd/ncsu-noemail-why-you-
couldshouldmust-use-better-ways-of-communicating-than-email/)

~~~
cryowaffle
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.

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hosh
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!

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

