

Every Single Email Client (That I Know Of) Is Completely Broken and Here’s Why - scottporad
http://www.scottporad.com/2011/06/08/every-single-email-client-that-i-know-of-is-completely-broken-and-heres-why/

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corin_
But.. they're email clients.

    
    
      You know what your Inbox is?  It’s inbound messages.  Just like voice mail or snail mail or smoke signals.
    

And if I turn on an answering machine, or open a letterbox, I expect to see
the inbound messages, not my todo list or calendar.

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muppetman
I don't think the author understands what email is.

As someone has commented on the blog itself, it's not like your Telephone
voicemail system is a task list!

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nodata
I'd argue that his workflow is broken.

If he is sitting all day staring at his inbox rather than _shock_ switching
windows between his task tracker or work or whatever, and his e-mail
interface, then that doesn't make every email client broken.

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sigil
There's an app for that...in fact, there's a YC S11 startup for that.

<http://www.taskforceapp.com/>

Of course, the author's idea that email is isomorphic to a todo list is pretty
ludicrous.

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nmcfarl
So it looks like a lot of people here do not have broken workflows, and mail
works for them. However, I like the author, have significant problems with my
inbox.

My inbox is as someone much smarter than me said "A todo list others write for
you". The problem is that they often have valid points, and I do indeed need
to do the tasks outlined in the mail. I would pay serious money for a tool
that helped me move tasks out of mail into my todo list in a sane fashion. As
it is the act of managing todo's inbound from my mail is a major % of my work
day. And that seems crazy.

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veidr
I believe there are various tools that will do exactly that for you.

For instance, I manage my tasks using OmniFocus, and in Apple's Mail program,
pressing a keyboard shortcut instantly creates a task in OmniFocus, with the
content of the email added as an attachment to the todo, and a link back to
the original message (just in case I want to refer to the whole thread or
something).

Another keyboard shortcut moves the message to my "Old Mail" folder on my IMAP
server. (I used to organize old mail by client or project or whatever, but
modern searching makes that unnecessary.)

I use two separate actions because the normal thing I do with a message is
glance at it and put it in Old Mail. If I need to make a task out of it, it's
one extra keystroke.

So my Inbox only has new messages in it that I haven't seen yet, and my task
list has all my tasks, including the ones originating from email, without much
friction.

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WettowelReactor
I use a similar approach. I have three folders I sort all mail into (Archive,
ToDo, Followup). With one keystroke any new messages get sent to the proper
folder and my task list simply consists of my ToDo email folder.

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molecule
spoiler: because they're not GTD apps.

