

Email sucks. This is how you fix it. - joncalhoun
http://joncalhoun.posterous.com/email-sucks-this-is-how-we-fix-it

======
jerf
The problem is of course real, the root cause is incorrectly identified. The
problem isn't that email _isn't_ integrated with anything else, it's that it
_can't_ be integrated with anything else. And the reason for that is email is
flat text (or gussied-up flat text in semi-HTML), and nothing else on your
system can understand it.

If your bug request came wrapped in some metadata about how it's a bug
request, then it would be easy to further integrate that into all sorts of
things.

OK, that's great. So why doesn't _that_ happen? Because defining such metadata
formats is a non-trivial exercise, and even more difficult is getting everyone
to _use_ those formats. So it turns out this is really just another specific
instance of the Great Semantic Divide, namely, how the heck can we actually
share semantics in any reasonable manner on large scales? It's the exact same
reason the Semantic Web hasn't happened.

Further, even if _that_ hurdle were to be crossed, you'd have the problem that
somebody, somewhere has to fill out the definition of a "bug report" before it
can be wrapped in the relevant metadata. Right now this step occurs when you
take the email and translate it into your todo system (or bug tracker or
whatever). In this perfect world this supposedly is done by the sender... but
that, too, is fraught with problems, because that takes a certain level of
skill on the sender side and now you've lost the aspect of email where you
just click "New Email", bash on the keyboard for a bit, and hit "Send", and it
mostly works. There's also some important context issues, which is that even
if the bug or task was perfectly filled out by the sender from their point of
view you'll still need to tweak it because you have a different perspective on
things. (Which is just the Great Semantic Divide popping up again.)

In summation, you're not just screwed, you're _comprehensively_ screwed.

~~~
brudgers
Metadata is a bit of a strawman.

There is sufficient information in the text to determine that the email is for
a feature request - otherwise the author wouldn't know it was one.

What's needed is an intelligent engine for processing email. Improving email
is an AI problem not one which requires an email to contain more information.

One difficulty I see is that developing a system for intelligently processing
email is not necessarily the sort of thing a startup can tackle - the required
data set for testing and validation is too large for a small company to obtain
naturally and test under real world conditions. It's the sort of problem that
lends itself to an "eat your own dogfood" approach - and thus justifiable at
an existing large company.

My gut tells me that outside the corporate world, this wants to be a desktop
application, not a web based one. The intelligent engine needs to know about
the files and documents on my computer to make better sense of the contents of
a message - I don't want to have to share all that with a web service and I
don't want to enter a bunch of metadata to create rules.

The software should know it's a bug report because I write a lot of code for
the product, have other bug reports on my computer, and posted ten bug fixes
to the code repository. not because I spent four days writing a CLIPS program
to handle bug reports.

It's a nasty problem if one tries to just grep it into submission. The answer
to the email problem is a poem, not an equation.

~~~
Sivart13
I don't know about the inductive logic behind your "humans can solve this
problem, therefore it is solvable by a computer". To create an algorithm that
could classify email as well as a human, you'd need to create an algorithm as
advanced as a human.

~~~
holri
Furthermore it would not help much. You still would have to monitor the
algorithm decisions. Otherwise you loose control over your work.

Never ever I would allow an algorithm to decide what is a bug and what is a
feature request.

------
Duff
You know, I hear that email sucks all of the time. It's all bunk.

Email has been around in it's present form for a good long time now. That
staying power is a good example of why it is a "good enough" solution for just
about anything.

It's like anything else... A general purpose tool will address 80% of your
needs. The other 20% works best with something more specialized.

~~~
zokier
Like PHP.

------
notatoad
Email is awesome. It's resilient, reliable, fast, flexible, open, and well
documented. Stop fixing it.

~~~
replax
I totally agree with you, except for the last sentence. Email is great, yes.
However, please continue to innovate, because there could be something more
awesome than email which would render email redundant.

~~~
notatoad
continuing to innovate is good, yes, but all the 'innovations' so far seem to
come at the expense of one of the good bits i mentioned. if your product makes
email more awesome but breaks interoperability, it's not awesome.

------
maccam94
Email is not designed to be a message queue. Applications (and business
processes) should not be built on email. You have bugs in a program? Get a bug
tracker. You need to handle your accounting? Get a web app for that. Email is
not broken because it doesn't do enough. Email is broken because people use it
for too much. Do you need to view every process that you interact with in your
life in step-by-step flat text messages? No. While the usefulness of
aggregating all of those messages in one place may be debatable, I don't think
that it belongs in your email account. Email should be treated as an
asynchronous communication medium for people only.

------
sheraz
With all due respect, email is not the problem. You are.

Your problems are not unique. Email is a great tool for delegation (to
humans), and you should learn to do that.

I trust that my co-workers and employees will take care of the tasks I assign
them. That lets me delegate and forget it.

Accounting? Pay this bill. Thanks.

Jr. Dev? File this as a bug. Thanks.

Co-founder? PG called, wants to invest. Meet him for lunch?

Technology is not always the answer. Many times behavior modification is the
better solution.

~~~
justncase80
True, but email really does suck too.

------
dskang
A logical extension of this idea would be the ability to send tasks. That is,
say that I'm a teacher and I want to send out an assignment that's due by 6pm
the next day to all my students. I should be able to send out a to-do task
attached to my email telling my students when the assignment is due, and each
student should be able to just click "add to my tasks" and have it integrate
with their existing tasks without each student having to manually create a
task.

~~~
greenyoda
This is actually something that Microsoft Outlook does reasonably well (and it
has existed for quite a long time). You can mail around tasks, meeting
requests, etc., and they can be automatically added to the recipients' task
lists or calendars. Unfortunately, everyone in the organization has to be
forced to use Outlook for this kind of stuff to work seamlessly.

------
tokenadult
From pg, not long ago, the essay "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas":

<http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html>

"2. Replace Email

"Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. Email is not a
messaging protocol. It's a todo list. Or rather, my inbox is a todo list, and
email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list."

------
gdilla
It would be nice to put the burden on the user to correctly apply
tags/metadata to their email as they send it. The hope is the sender will
think a little more deeper as to why and what their sending, and this just
makes email organization easier all around, especially for the receiver. But I
guess this opens up complexities on the universality of email...

------
ajhit406
Surprised nobody has mentioned Gmail filters yet. I use Gmail filters for my
non-priority tasks. Things that I want to do in groups (like customer service
emails) get labeled and archived immediately so I'm not distracted.

Gmail Filters are pretty damn powerful-- not sure if they support REGEXs on
email subjects, but that'd be pretty amazing.

Omnifocus is developing a feature to allow "send to omnifocus" tasks where you
can send your tasks to USERNAME@omnifocus.com and it will add them to your
inbox. There's tons of potential with this, as it could be extended to assign
tasks to specific projects, assign priorities, and set task due dates and gcal
integration.

Do any email protocols accept XML or JSON? Not sure if that's even possible
but I guess you could send a JSON object in the header and write a new client
that handles it appropriately...

~~~
dredmorbius
They're nothing that procmail can't do. And they're not a lot of things
procmail _can_ do, including revising content, and feeding mail directly into
other processes (both for delivery and for action).

As with many GUI mail tools, one of the biggest limitations of GMail filters
is that you can't reorder them. The priority in which you assign filters is
really critical.

------
tikhonj
Heh, you could put something very capable and integrated really quickly using
Emacs--all the building blocks are already there. I imagine combining Org-
mode, an email client, your development environment and whatever else you
happen to use in Emacs with a bit of elisp glue would do most of what the post
proposes quickly and elegantly.

Coincidentally, can you use AucTeX's LaTeX previews in other buffers? Being
able to see LaTeX equations in emails and chat buffers would be great.

~~~
joncalhoun
That is great for me but not so great for those who aren't techies.

------
dredmorbius
Yawn.

What you want is at task management system with a defined format which can be
encapsulated in email messages.

Say, like, Debian's BTS: <http://www.debian.org/Bugs/server-control>

No, that's not something I'd expect the general public to use, but it's a good
start and proof of concept.

Email itself provides you transport, storage, and overall format definitions.

MIME gives you attachment encapsulation for whatever format you care to
provide.

MIME encoded signatures give you authentication and/or privacy (you care about
that shit, right?)

Now "all you need to do" is define a task management standard and the
interchange format that it uses. Drag'n'drop or procmail/maildrop filter
attachments to your task management tool.

Wait for the world to beat a path to your door.

You've identified _ONE_ use-case for mail. As with other use-cases, there are
a few bits that could be tweaked to make it so (the standards adoption bit is
the hard one). And while email / SMTP certainly has its warts, there's no need
to scrap the entire system for your specific needs.

------
vibrant
I've been working on a product also in this direction but it's more full
featured and mature. It's called <http://dynado.com> and we're launching
within a month (don't look at the design - the final main site isn't up yet).

It's basically a webmail where you can decide to either send somebody a task
or an email. Everything goes through email though and you can send a task to
anyone, even people from outside the system. They can then either collaborate
via email or register to use the system themselves.

Of course it's integrated with an IM, file storage solution where you can
attach those files, browse a stream of sent/received attachments. It also has
a project tree and reports per-user or project, with really simple and
integrated time tracking. AND it has a built in calendar with an innovative
twist.

Basically it's an all-in-one business management tool tightly integrated with
email in order to let you use the tools you know (email) but still capture all
the knowledge and track all the tasks without switching to 10 different apps.

------
guynamedloren
Interesting. I've thought about this very problem before. In fact, I even
started building a solution. Most of my emails, like the OPs, ended up as
todos, so it makes sense to skip the email part. The idea is that you have
buckets of todos, and other people can assign todos directly to you, at which
point they show up in your bucket, etc.

The project never grew past MVP, but lately I've been using Asana and it seems
to be very close to what I was envisioning. I wonder if they're aiming to be
an email replacement down the road. I could certainly see it happening, and
they're already on the right path. There's no way they're planning on changing
the world [1] with just a todo list app :)

[1]
[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/11/facebook-...](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/11/facebook-
co-founder-dustin-moskovitz-unveils-new-company-.html)

> "We think it will be as impactful on the world as Facebook was." - Dustin
> Moskovitz (fb/asana)

------
hartez
Lots of programs already have this integration. Is it a bug report or feature
request? Forward it to FogBugz. FogBugz figures out where it belongs (and if
it gets it wrong, you tell it and it learns). Is it a task? Forward it to Flow
and it gets entered as a task. Travel itinerary from your airline/car rental
service/hotel? Forward it to TripIt. Works like magic.

This problem has, generally speaking, been addressed. You're just not using
tools that address it. Which is not to say that there isn't room for
improvement, or gaps in this toolchain (e.g., I can't think of a tool for
bills/invoices off the top of my head, though I bet one exists). And
addressing it by creating a solution for your specific combination of problems
is certainly admirable.

But it's not email that's broken; if anything is broken, it's the endpoints
(both the source and the destination). Saying email is broken is like saying
the | operator in Unix is broken.

------
jonbischke
We kinda/sorta do this already with Asana. We have email addresses set for
common projects and then just forward a lot of emails into the correct
projects (assigning to other team members when appropriate). It's not
_exactly_ what the author of the article is looking for but pretty close.

------
bcjordan
_I planned on just using it internally until all the bugs where worked out but
what the heck it would be freaking awesome to get you using it now so you can
tell me if you love it or it sucks._

For those of us considering signing up, do you personally find your product
useful?

~~~
scalhoun2005
I'm working on this project as well so I can add a little insight.

I needed one place I could login to, add as many email accounts as I wanted
and manage them from one location online. The email accounts run via the imap
protocol.

I can't tell you how many times I've been working on a project and a client
sends one team member a email and others don't get it, but we assume they did.

So I can create a list called "Roockit Bugs" share it with other users and
drag and drop any email from any email account onto a task. A popup screen
loads and auto-fills the task with the subject and inserts the email body into
the description. I can now edit that task as needed and click save & archive.
Now everyone can view it and can comment on it. The email is archived and out
of my inbox so the right person can take care of it.

This process can work the same as above but I can drag a email to the messages
section and it's converted to a message for all users to see. This makes sure
everyone in a list stays on the same page without forwarding emails all over.

This is just scratching the surface but gives you the basic idea.

------
tnash
Seems like you need to go from communication into to-do into work in a way
that is easier then we do now. Your solution seems interesting, but it has
very limited scope. Maybe something like what pg talked about in #2 of
<http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html> would work. We need different
protocols for different types of communication. A protocol for sending todo
requests, a protocol for sending personal notes, etc. It would need work to
figure out the details though (it's something I'm working on for my startup,
but I haven't spent a lot of time on this particular problem yet). Thanks for
putting your solution out there.

~~~
nileshtrivedi
We just need to agree on universal MIME types for things like todos, events
etc. Email already supports this, so the problem is really political and not
technical.

------
alanh
The other big problem with email is it’s still never encrypted.

If anyone wants to experiment with such things, please contact me
(alanhogan.com/contact), and we can trade public keys. Our experiences will
inform a related blog post I am working on.

------
tszming
Have you tried ifttt?

e.g.

Create task in Asana when mail labeled Todo <http://ifttt.com/recipes/18551>

------
5vforest
I like this post, but to me, the gist of this is that we should have
"droplets" that do different tasks for an email, so as to cut down on
repetitive tasks.

I'm all in, but it seems to me that it would be best left to the end user --
if someone gets a bug report email, they might want to track the bug in
Bugzilla, or Github Issues, etc. Not sure if signing into an external service
is really necessary.

------
toddmorey
I forward any email that needs me to do something to Asana. Asana
automatically creates a todo for me with the email content as an attached
note.

------
solnyshok
I want a solution, that, after I enter recipient's name, looks up that peson's
defined tag cloud (or folder structure with keywords pulled automatically by
analyzing content of such folders) and helps me (the sender) to tag my email,
even pops up bug report form, if there is one, defined by recipient.

------
sp332
This reminds me a lot of Mitch Kapor's pet project, Chandler. It was really
buggy but I guess after years of development, it finally stabilized. Any
"note" can be morphed into a task, calendar event, or email.
<http://chandlerproject.org/>

------
sliverstorm
_I am proposing that when you get an email from Company X about a new feature
request, you should only need to drag the email into the "Company X Features"
list. This should instantly create a todo task, share it with everyone with
access to the "Company X Features" list, and everyone working on the task
should be able to see relevant portions of the original email._

This is what mailing lists are for. Forward the email to the "Company X
Features" list, and you've got it.

If you need something with more sophisticated group-wide activity tracking,
emails and todolists are indeed poor choices- try filing a bug, and CC'ing the
mailing list.

I know on HN it's not hip to _not_ complain about email, and maybe these
methods aren't the second coming of productivity, but they seem to work pretty
darn well without having to reinvent the wheel.

------
pbreit
Email has some major problems but I'm not sure helping me file manually is a
solution I'm looking for. But I'll be interested in trying Rockit out.

What I am really looking forward to is <http://fluent.io>

------
dsirijus
The key issue with this is - I (representing majority) don't have these
issues. I send some mails to RTM as tasks, label around, forward some, and,
most importantly, resolve the ones I can resolve immediately. I receive ~50
new mails a day.

------
joncalhoun
Power is out on my block, so sorry if I'm not answering emails or questions
from everyone very quickly. I am currently running on laptop batter (1.5 hrs
left) and my cell phone tethering.

 _sigh_ \- Good ol' Silicon Valley Power.

------
kingkawn
I believe this title is how the Google Wave introduction began

~~~
joncalhoun
Lets hope we don't end like Google Wave did. Shutting down a service is never
fun.

------
nileshtrivedi
There is a typo in the screenshot at <http://www.roockit.com/>: "Noifications"

~~~
joncalhoun
Thanks :) That slipped through.

------
hogu
Emacs org mode does this, I realize that its not a viable solution for most
people but its pretty amasing.

------
michaelfeathers
See Chandler. Read 'Dreaming in Code.' Avoid that fate.

------
bmelton
Does anyone know of a cache for this. It seems down, but it's Posterous? Other
posterous blogs seem to be up.

Edit: Diregard -- working now.

~~~
joncalhoun
Its possibly that Posterous had a hiccup. I have only written 2 posts there so
they probably didn't expect 8000 views in a few hours.

------
billpatrianakos
This is a solution but it isn't _the_ solution. Email doesn't need to get
better it needs replacing. I'll give everyone a hint: Basecamp _almost_ has it
right. If you focus on groups with the option to drill down to projects,
individual schedules, and to-do's all in one then you're on the right path. On
top of that the solution needs to be something everyone is using or can begin
using quickly. Think Facebook. It's hard to explain but when you see it,
you'll know it. I'm working on it myself.

Not that this isn't good. It really is but I can see it being unnatural for
some. If only there was a way to do this without changing so much of your
usual habits and kind of fitting yourself into a workflow someone else
designed then it'd be massively popular. That said, this far from
unimpressive. It's awesome and I'm sure a ton of people will find it super
useful. But even the people who are getting Nigerian inheritances need some
love. If someone built something that addressed the people that would use this
but is also useful to the inheritance people I bet you anything those non-
power users would actually find ways to use it even if they aren't busy a lot
like how people who aren't social butterflies still log into Facebook and post
status updates once a day.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Sorry, but no. I've been on dozens of Basecamp projects and the only way
anyone reliably uses it is if they rely on the email notifications.

~~~
billpatrianakos
I probably wasn't as clear as I could've been. Obviously we already have
Basecamp. That would only be one component and not every feature makes the
cut.

I really truly believe that some form of project management can and will
replace email and it can become integrated into our lives like Facebook my
biggest qualm with project management is the project part. People aren't
always necessarily working on projects but we sure do work with groups and
keeping track of what's going on in all those groups is tough. I haven't seen
anything that does it the way I feel it should yet. I'm not talking socially
either. I'm talking about a tool that'll let you see what your family is up to
or what your church group is doing etc. Yeah, I just described Facebook but
the difference will be in how it lends itself to being used. Like if Facebook
and Bascamp had a baby.

~~~
replax
Well, the baby of Facebook and Basecamp would definitely be online, which
makes it impossible for it to even want to compete with email.

If you cannot search, read and write messages OFFLINE it has failed in my
eyes. Outside of silicon valley or whereever, there are places where you will
not get a connection.

Furthermore, it'd have to be more of a protocol rather than a service itself.
many companies will not rely on some third party for hosting their most
valuable information and communication network. same goes for individuals,
probably <1%, but that is the tech-savy crowd...

~~~
joncalhoun
We are actually working on a way to allow companies to host all of this
internally while still using our services. This would mean that any company
with security concerns could host everything internally and we would still be
able to provide support and features.

Along with that we also plan on providing offline support through standalone
clients - though this isn't something we are focusing on at the moment. Right
now we just want to get the user experience perfected.

------
pconf
The problem, in a nutshell, is that the OP has never managed an email server.
The solution is no secret: postfix, exim, sendmail, or qmail (in that order)
with spamassassin, amavis, spamhaus, dcc, razor, greylisting, clamav and
occasional bayes db priming. Any ISP doing this will be able to tag and block
and/or populate a spam folder with all but 5 to 10 false-negative spams per
week.

Anyone getting more spam than should switch email ISPs. This is the real
problem IMO, people who stay with incompetent email ISPs (including yahoo,
aol, 1and1, att and several other large and small but technically challenged
organizations).

~~~
joncalhoun
I'm not trying to filter spam. Gmail does great at that. I'm trying to manage
the non-spam emails I get. In fact Roockit's goal isn't to be an email
provider - we simply want to help manager your current email.

