

2,433 Unread Emails Is An Opportunity For An Entrepreneur - dcurtis
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/23/a-crisis-in-communication/

======
mosburger
What if you knew the depth of the mail queue of the person to whom you were
writing, _before_ you wrote the e-mail? E.g., you are writing an e-mail to
your boss, and when you start writing, you see that he or she has 150 unread
e-mails. Might you change your mind and decide that it either 1.) wasn't that
important after all, or 2.) important enough to relay the message in person or
on the phone?

~~~
hollerith
Not a bad idea!

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joshwa
IDEA: A Karma "bank" for email.

I set up an account at emailkarma.com (sadly, taken, by Xobni, no less!) as a
recipient. I set a default free karma amount (say, 100) for new senders, a
default karma amount for unsigned emails (say, 50), and route all my email
through the service. I also set up a whitelist of known good senders with an
infinite karma balance.

People who email me for the first time will automatically be issued 100 karma
points by the system. They have one of two options:

1\. People who don't know about the karma system can email me directly, but
their emails will "spend" the default amount for unsigned emails. When their
balance reaches zero, their emails get de-emphasized.

2\. People who know about the karma system can choose to spend their remaining
balance with me by tagging the email subject with [karma: pointvalue].
Unimportant emails can be assigned less value, and if they absolutely need to
email me, then they can spend more of their karma.

Incoming emails are sorted by date and by karma spend. I can reward relevance
by giving them more points to spend, and/or by setting their default karma
spend to a higher value. I can punish stupidity by adjusting karma
accordingly. Webmail interface, or a thunderbird plugin, maybe?

Senders can view their karma balance for a given recipient and default spend
(both uneditable) by emailing the service to prove identity and signing up.

Arrington, for instance, can reward good tipsters with more karma, and punish
PR trolls by slapping them with a karma penalty.

You could apply this to other forms of communication, too-- your
facebook/friendfeed, twitter, etc., though those would have to be passive
(relevance weighted by karma balance, no discrete spend available per
post/recipient).

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pg
I agree, and YC is eager to hear proposals from startups working on cures for
email overload.

~~~
dcurtis
Wouldn't an email overload cure be the supreme complement to Xobni?

~~~
pg
It was in fact what Xobni started out working on.

~~~
serhei
So what happened to change that?

~~~
pg
They moved on to bigger ideas.

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henning
I'd love to try to tackle a difficult but noble challenge like this, but I
myself do not suffer from email overload (having a simple life where no one
cares what you think has its perks) so I'm really not able to empathize with
people like Scoble or Mike Arrington. I'd probably do a crappy job of things.

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mhartl
I'm not so sure about this one. There's massive selection bias: people with
the ability to complain to thousands of people are exactly those most likely
to be suffering from email overload. It certainly seems to be a growing
problem, but I haven't heard my mom, dad, or sister complain yet. I'll let
y'all know when they do. :-)

~~~
notauser
A data point in point: I'm working for a very big company at the moment.

The biggest span of control (direct reports) is 12. The number of people with
an indirect span of control of greater than 200 people is about 100.

...mind you, that 100 have a lot of money to throw at solutions. Which is why
they already have secretaries.

------
dkokelley
The thing with email is that it does not require much of a time commitment
from even the sender.

Older methods of communication like a phone call or in person meeting require
the person who initiates the conversation to invest some time in getting what
they want from the conversation.

Let's assume that the majority of the emails received are primarily for the
sender's benefit (ex. "please tell me what you think about x for my project"
"Could you do an interview for y?"). These messages should get the lowest
priority and could even be deleted if they can't be answered within a week or
two.

The next set of emails are of mutual benefit to the sender and receiver (such
as conversations between clients and companies, friends to friends, and
_productive_ internal corporate communication).

The final category is emails for the receiver's sole benefit. Automatically
generated emails _should_ be in this category, if they are to inform you that
your credit card may have been compromised. Most emails here don't require a
response from the receiver. Spam and marketing materials do not fall into this
category.

Of course in each category you could drill down by priority depending on the
situation.

~~~
mleonhard
If we had a good way to send and receive money through the Internet then it
might make sense to charge a fee to accept an incoming email. One would have a
whitelist of senders who get automatic refunds. Everyone else will be spending
_real_ _money_ to send you email.

A tiny "postage" fee might also solve spam.

~~~
dkokelley
I think that you might be on to something with the fee in the sense that you
could apply a solicitation surcharge to unapproved senders. It would only work
if it was guaranteed to get your response, otherwise it's not worth it.

What about a separate email address (or even domain) for premium email? You
could set the fee to receive an email (and adjust it to restrict flow to what
you can handle), and refund people who don't get a response from you within x
period of time. Certain senders could be excluded from paying. The senders
could even choose how much to pay (These emails were sent without payment.
Those were.)

You then publish only that address on your site/blog/whatever, and give your
personal address to friends and family.

This idea needs a lot of digging into to really see if it's viable but I like
the concept. The potential downside is that the government might like the idea
of email tax.

------
kul
anshu jain, who runs Deutsche Bank's investment banking arm had 2 full time
PAs who read his email and filtered accordingly. They were paid 7 figures and
were very smart. The top business people, I presume, don't read their email
directly. It's all filtered.

As for Mike A, I presume a huge inbox is party because he's running a huge and
growing business, and has leveraged himself to the max. In that sense, it's no
bad thing.

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skmurphy
The unmet demand may be closer to 10,000 a day for "high volume communication"
and knowledge workers because there is a "shadow backlog" caused by the poor
performance of the current approach. There are a couple of different
categories of interaction:

I don't want to lose a key e-mail from someone new (e.g. a prospect) or
someone I want to reconnect with (e.g. an old friend) in the midst of
everything else

I want to have some answers suggested based on a collection of blog posts, a
FAQ, or some other knowledge repository.

I want to recombine a number of e-mails into a complex branching thread
because that's a work flow that a team I am a member of embraces (see
[http://www.43folders.com/2008/03/12/patterns-email-
conversat...](http://www.43folders.com/2008/03/12/patterns-email-conversation)
) so that I have the full context for the conversation.

I want to make sure I don't lose touch with folks I have had a prior shared
success with (I would like to boost my effective dunbar number).

There are several others. Please feel free to contact me directly if you would
like to continue the conversation. I think this is one area that is overdue
for a significant change in paradigm, the evidence that the current approach
isn't scaling can be found in a variety of secondary and tertiary coping
behaviors that we have come to accept without attacking the root cause. I
think there will be many approaches that continue to use SMTP as a transport
protocol but enhance the user interface with embedded analytics and
automation, as well as adding alternative forms of response to include
blogging, wikis, IM, and VoIP.

see also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143878>

------
byrneseyeview
If you read that and think "I have 24 emails a day; he must be getting about
100x as many pings for his attention," it might be worth reconsidering how
people react to his email policy. If I wanted to get in touch with this guy, I
wouldn't send an email. I'd send five, spaced an hour or two apart, with
varying subject lines. One joke, one brief and ambiguous ("re:requested") one
with caps, etc.

He'd probably be getting 400 emails a day if he didn't force people to resend
anything they expected him to read.

------
Tichy
Or an opportunity for a secretary?

~~~
skmurphy
Even with a secretary it would be hard to manage 1,000 e-mails per day, much
less 10,000 using the current e-mail clients. This would also be true of
outsourcing it to a team of hardworking Estonians, Irish, Indians, or
Canadians. Look at electronic discovery techniques (reading e-mail in a
lawsuit evidence discovery process) where you may pay dozens of attorneys to
sort through e-mail as another limit case of throwing bodies at the problem.

------
aneesh
Would an urgency metric be a solution, allowing you to sort those 2433 emails
to see the 50 that you really should reply to?

~~~
dcurtis
That would require you to sort each email based on urgency, and the only way
to do that (effectively) is to open and read the email. That's the problem.

~~~
aneesh
Point taken. Perhaps some combination of the sender and subject could be a
reasonable approximation? In my own experience, the sender almost exclusively
determines the importance or urgency of any email.

------
danw
The simple solution: A mail client that doesn't say how many unread messages
you have. If it's urgent they'll find another way of contacting you.

This is one of the great things about Twitter. Nowhere is there a "x twitters
unread" on the site. You simply dip in and out as you wish.

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edw519
Hey kids, how about a contest?

Someone (not me) could create a control data base of say 2,433 emails. The
data base could be downloadable.

Whoever feels like it could work on their solution and in x weeks or so post
either a url for their new app, a proposal, or even a report based on the
data. The rest of us could vote just as we normally do and the top 3
contestants could compete for the top prize of ________.

(I may be onto something, but my creativity is waning. A little help please.
Any ideas?)

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
i really like that idea actually. having a controlled and constant data set,
could provide a lot of insight.

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sbraford
If any system (attempting to solve this problem) allows one to add 2,433
emails to an "inbox", then it is doomed to fail.

Sometimes, it's the tool user, not the tool itself, that is to blame.

------
shafqat
In the world of vitamin problems, this is definately a pain killer. I wish I
had time to work on a second startup and tackle this as well. Best of luck to
those who do - I'm eagerly waiting.

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ph0rque
How about a Bayesian solution that observes how you answer emails, and
prefills a reply (or automatically puts emails into trash) based on your
historical reaction to similar emails?

~~~
notauser
Dear Mom,

Thank you for your recipe for fairy cakes. Thanks to my previous responses to
e-mails containing the word fairy here are some links to soft core homosexual
porn.

Yours,

Soon to be out of the closet Joe, who no longer trusts the guy tuning his
auto-mail algorithm.

:)

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rms
Hire an offshore personal assistant to read/sort your email?

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bayareaguy
I'd love to see something along the lines of <http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html>

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whacked_new
I think this problem is less of AI, more of HI; not so much a computing
problem but more of a cognitive one.

