
Email needs to be realtime - ssclafani
http://sachin.posterous.com/email-needs-to-be-realtime
======
ctkrohn
There's a hierarchy of immediacy for communication methods:

* Cell Phone: Make me drop everything and talk to you

* Desk Phone: If I'm free, I'll talk to you

* IM, SMS: Maybe I'm jammed and I can't reply right this second, but I'll take a look and get back ASAP. For what it's worth, Bloomberg messaging falls into this category.

* Email: Give me a couple hours and I'll write a thoughtful response

* Physical letters: Probably something important that you need to keep a hardcopy of. Expect a response in a couple days.

Email has a very nice niche that's as much a consequence of social convention
as it is of the protocol. If email became realtime and people expected
responses within 30 seconds or even 5 minutes, it would lose much of its
value.

~~~
Groxx
While I generally agree, in my experience _extremely_ few cell phone calls
require the immediacy implied by them.

I'd love a screening system: "press 1 to make my phone ring", otherwise
straight to voicemail where I'll also get informed via Voice -> Email if I
don't check it sooner.

~~~
tlrobinson
Yeah, Google Voice should add that feature. Or you could build it pretty
easily with Twilio.

~~~
izendejas
Google Voice does come with call screening:
<http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html>

~~~
Groxx
Which I've used, but it's a PITA rather than any real aid, especially w/o an
Android phone. It also slows down and mildly annoys anyone who is calling you
(maybe not a bad thing, but certainly not the _same_ thing). And it's only
really useful for people _not_ in your contacts list, which is probably
significantly less than 1/2 if you're not using it for work.

Plus, anyone not annoyed enough will still make your phone ring every time
they call, demanding attention _now_ to at least see who called. But I could
do that before, with caller ID.

------
simonsarris
By realtime the autor means that it would pop up like an IM/SMS. I'm not so
sure I'm convinced that emails popping up like IMs is a good idea.

I have nothing wrong with getting my emails _faster_ , and I'm sure it would
benefit a lot of people, but personally I don't want email to be realtime in
the way that IMs or texting is. More importantly, I don't want anyone who
emails me to _expect_ it to be realtime.

When I want that kind of availability I have phone-availability and instant-
message (be it phone-based or PC based). I'd rather keep email to important-
yet-not-time-sensitive things.

If email were "realtime," I would have some kind of expectation coming from
the people that want to use it in such a way, thereby beguiling me into
constantly letting it be checked (by it alerting me).

Even if I don't allow it to pop up on my device I would still have to explain
to each new contact that email for me does not mean an instantaneous read and
reply.

Some of my friends get cranky when I don't answer their IMs instantly, I think
it would be a bit of a pain if people treated email with the same expectations
of responsiveness.

~~~
srveit
That reminds me of my old boss expecting email to be the same as an answered
phone call. There was a problem in our system that he wanted me and a co-
worker to solve by working late and he sent us a both an email. The was close
to the end of the day. I didn't read the email until the next morning. He
yelled at me for not putting in the extra effort and leaving it to my co-
worker. The really funny part was that his office was only 20 steps away from
my desk and he could have dialed a four digit number to reach my desk phone.
And this was back in 1994.

~~~
chmike
There is a HR joke about mail. He send a mail request not relevant and the
first one to answer is fired because it means this guy is not realy busy.

------
patio11
Different strokes for different folks, but one of the most frequent pieces of
productivity advice I've seen given is "disable the notification when new
email arrives." Checking your email on a regular, infrequent schedule lets you
establish flow and get work done in between getting work pushed at you.

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run4yourlives
Um, I think the author needs a blackberry. Most businesses use them.

That being said, the last thing I need is to be _more_ connected to anything
other than the location and persons that are within a five foot radius to me
at any given time.

------
sumeetjain
_"I want emails to popup on my phone just like SMS does."_

My first thought was, "Really? I would hate that." But I think it could be
great as long as there is an easy way to limit the notifications to only show
emails from certain people, with certain labels, etc.

The idea of arriving at a restaurant and emailing my friends to ask where they
are is appealing, because it's a move in the direction of a single
communication address for a person. I don't like needing to store both a phone
number and an email address for someone. How FaceTime for the new iPhone
places calls is nice for this reason as well.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Emailing them to find out where they are? Your respective phones should have
determined that you're meeting each other due to a calendar meeting, shared
your locations, notified you that the other person is half a mile away and
will arrive in 10 minutes and told the other person that you've already
arrived and are waiting.

~~~
mryall
Interesting idea, but that would be too much of an invasion of privacy for my
taste. It's one thing to tell someone where you are when they call (or email),
but a completely different thing for your phone to update someone on your
exact location just because you're meeting with them.

~~~
mike-cardwell
True, but meeting events can have optional parameters. Location sharing could
be added.

[x] Share my location with other attendees during this event.

------
city41
Push email has been around for years [1], in particular MS Exchange has been
push based for as long as I can remember. I honestly can't see how it's a
beneficial thing either. I find pretty much every single push service to be
extremely distracting. Sure IM has its benefits, it's a great way to
communicate with your dev team throughout the day. It's also an unbelievably
huge distraction. Turn off your push based services and I can just about
guarantee a productivity boost.

[1] -- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_e-mail>

~~~
jbert
Push email dates to 4.0BSD (or so the man page for 'biff' tells me):

<http://www.unix.com/man-page/freebsd/1/biff/>

------
mikeryan
I dunno my email seems realtime enough. I get growl notifications with new
email and freak out if there's a red dot with a number in it on my iphone mail
app.

Heck I had to turn off the vibration or sound notifications of new email on my
phone because of the sheer volume.

I guess I kind of disagree - Email can be as "realtime" as you need it to be
and IM/SMS seems to take care of the rest in my book.

------
miratrix
As I see it, the real power of email comes from the inherent queuing nature -
it allows you to decouple your schedule from demands of others.

Being "realtime", especially if the senders have the expectation that the
message is realtime, means necessarily losing that queuing nature which
greatly diminishes email's flexibility and resilience.

The biggest problem with realtime is that you _need_ to implement some sort of
access control, or otherwise you'll be inundated and overwhelmed with
messages. If we turn email to realtime, we'll necessarily need to build the
access control (or some sort of super filter) into it, and that basically
shuts down the open nature of email. You can argue that open email is good
(emailing Steve Jobs) or bad (spams) but it _is_ something that has real
value.

------
Qz
_I want emails to popup on my phone just like SMS does. And I want to be able
to quickly reply just like SMS.

I would love to see someone write a better email application for the iphone
that does push notifications, quick replies, smart threading, etc._

Uh, get a Droid phone? Mine does all of this.

------
alexkiwi
Email is great because everyone can use the protocol in the way they want to.
If you really want real-time email, it can be built.

I'd prefer not to open that box, it took me years of fortifying my gmail
filter defenses, playing around with Tim Ferriss style auto-responders, and
using 3 sentenc.es before I found Inbox Zero zen.

Realtime e-mail could be great for certain purposes such as customer service,
but I hope that it never become the personal norm.

~~~
mikemol
Low-latency email carrying is awesomely variable. It's asynchronous, and I can
reply quickly if I want to. If I don't want to (such as if a fast response is
more a waste of time, or encouraging unnecessary queries), I can hold off for
an hour or two without annoying most people.

I've been accused of turning email into instance-messaging, if the email
service is low-latency enough. GMail's typical turnaround for me is under a
minute, sometimes under 30 seconds, if the response doesn't need to be
extensive. (It usually doesn't.)

Thanks to presence notification and expectation of synchronous communication,
IM tends to be very synchronous, and almost as draining and disruptive as
phone calls.

------
ryanmickle
Not sure I agree with Sachin. If I want people to be in touch real time, I
give them my mobile so he or she can text me. Otherwise, I'm looking for less
emailed noise, not more.

Yet, if the discussion is strictly that of the protocol's limitations, not
sure it would hurt to ensure more immediate delivery, but I agree with the
other commenters that IM seems to float the boat. Not sure I've ever heard
anyone complain that IM isn't fast enough for them. Perhaps the discussion
should be about a migration of IM to a shared, open standard, as opposed the
silos of Gchat/jabber, Skype, AIM, FB chat, etc.

------
abraham
It is called Google Wave. Oh wait...

~~~
elbenshira
Google Wave was ahead of its time. I'm sure Wave or something similar will
show up and prove to be useful maybe five years from now.

~~~
nooneelse
I don't even know why it would take that long... I, and I think many others,
would love an opt-in, light-weight, "simple collaborative documents" side
channel in the gmail interface (with the option to push a document over to the
full gdocs interface) should be doable for them as of about yesterday or the
month before. Apparently the larger public needs baby steps on this sort of
thing, but lots of us don't.

------
alanh
What he’s really arguing for is a new medium, like SMS that works on more than
just cellphones, not faster email.

As anyone could tell you, push email is far too disruptive.

Qmail (quick mail, if you allow me to co-opt the term) would be text-only and
as "push" as possible. It would be Bad Manners to qmail someone something that
is not as urgent as an SMS, something better sent by email.

~~~
Qz
I don't think that's what he wants.

------
RuadhanMc
Email needs to be left alone.

------
RBr
I found that my productivity went up when I turned the frequency of my e-mail
delivery down. Now, it's set at 30 minutes between checks.

This way, e-mails pile up a little bit and I can easily filter through them
rather then feel like I need to respond to every one. Don't get me wrong, I
still reply to every e-mail but I've found that a lot of stuff solves itself
in 30 minutes.

The best part is that short of phone calls and IM, I'm left alone to focus on
what I need to get done and the natural 30 min patterns of focus seem to
refresh my train of thought and I think help improve my focus.

Rather then real-time, I say try turning up the delivery time for a while. You
might be surprised!

------
AndrewDucker
Email _is_ realtime.

IMAP IDLE does exactly this - push email. I get email on my phone as soon as
it arrives at the server. Sadly, the email app on Android doesn't do this out
of the box, but the K9 email app does it perfectly well.

------
mike-cardwell
Email has many many advantages over SMS. To the point where my girlfriend and
I usually email each other using our phones rather than SMSing. (An Android G1
with 10 minute IMAP polls, and an iPhone with push).

------
cracki
if email is to become the medium for instant messages and "phone call"
messages, some things will have to change.

if someone phones me (or sends an SMS), they know they'll reach me right now
because my mobile phone is always on.

if someone sends me an IM, they hope to reach me now, but waiting is
acceptable, because i might not be at a computer or my IM client isn't
running.

if those two are to work via email, i'd need a second address that acts like a
phone number. people trying to reach me on that address can expect to get
through right now. of course, if you abuse that privilege, you end up on my
killfile and i'll only notice your messages later.

IM-style communication would run on the old email address. when i'm
online/available, you can probably chat with me in realtime. if i'm not
available right now, i won't even know about the new messages right away, but
i'll get to it later.

there were several occasions when i was emailing back and forth with someone
within minutes. seamlessly turning that into a chat session would be awesome,
but email still doesn't have sub-second delivery times and email clients still
display emails like big, important letters and not like lines of a chat
session. i think there can be an UI that looks good for both chat sessions
(many small messages) and emails (few large messages).

------
mcav
It's not entirely what the author is describing, but these days e-mail
delivery [via Gmail IMAP for me] is essentially instant already. The rest is
just UI alert notifications.

------
mildweed
Speaking of, Greylisting (using SMTP 451 to verify a sending server is
standards-compliant) needs to speed up. Most servers' retry time is waaayyyy
too long.

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jmtame
disagree here--just yesterday i turned off "fetch data" on the iPhone because
being alerted each time i got an email becomes quickly annoying and
distracting.

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finnomenon
try having your server tell the senders mail server to resend the email in X
minutes. a pretty nice spam killing technique but it costs time. you can white
list them after they get through the first time so the following emails don't
have that artificial delay.

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mcosta
What this guy describes is the stuff RIM is selling years before the iPhone;

~~~
mcosta
I did not finish, the sentence....

What this guy describes is the stuff RIM is selling years before the iPhone;
form over function sindrome?

------
InclinedPlane
If your job is mostly concerned with coordinating with other people, then this
is correct, the more realtime the better. However, if mail merely supports
your work, then realtime mail is unnecessary and, indeed, quite unhelpful. The
great thing about email (compared to, say, the telephone) is that it works
well for both cases.

------
hackermom
Has the guy ever heard about IRC?

~~~
wmf
Probably, but what does that have to do with his point? I doubt he wants to
force other people to change their habits so that he can get information
faster.

~~~
epochwolf
> I doubt he wants to force other people to change their habits so that he can
> get information faster.

I think that's exactly what he's going for. Why else would you make email
"realtime".

