Email Dashboard

One of the savviest new media/Web 2.0/social media/etc blogger/analyst/commentators out there, Jeremiah Owyang, just wrote a great post on how Email Consumes Us.   This comes on the heels of Michael Arrington’s post on email troubles that I just wrote about.

As I’ve been writing about for a while, the very nature of email itself is changing.  Two major things have changed about email in the past few years.  The volume (duh, more!) and the nature (it’s no longer just individual messages, it’s projects and tasks and collaboration).

Yet email clients are still fundamentally designed to process messages one by one and treat them as independent units of data.  That approach just doesn’t scale and doesn’t reflect the type of connected and context-rich information contained within email.

Somewhat ironically, web-based solutions are by and large using email as the standard notification hub, actually increasing the requirement for more intelligent and sophisticated email processing.  Next generation solutions for email are going to have to be much smarter about handling email intelligently and in much bigger chunks than just one message at a time.

Email is out of control.  We hear you, and we’re working on it very hard!  Many thousands of business email users are already using ClearContext to stay on top of their email and actually get their work done, but we’re just getting started.  I expect you’ll see a lot of other players entering the space as well, because this problem isn’t going away anytime soon.  The level of pain people feel with email is opening the door to a whole new generation of solutions, and we intend to be right at the forefront of this email revolution.

I grew up being taught to say please and thank you as just a matter of simple courtesy for actions large and small.  But more and more, I find this to be at odds w/ polite and efficient email practices.  A quick scan finds a number of other people with similar opinions:

Is your e-mail necessary, important or useful? If not, don’t send
it. That includes unnecessary replies, such as “Okay, thanks,” or “Take
it easy.”  – TheWritersBag.com

My personal view is that just saying thanks as a way of acknowledging
an email is pretty pointless. But expressing gratitude in the right
context is a necessary part of courtesy. –  badlanguage.net

Don’t send e-mails
that simply say "Thanks." – fabjob.com

and some strong opinions on both sides of the issue in response to Paul McNamara’s blog entry on the question Thanks or no thanks?

Now, there are many lengthy projects/exchanges or situations where people put in a lot of effort, and those cases merit an actual response expressing your gratitude.

But if the appropriate level of response to someone’s email is simply "Thanks" and nothing more, then I lean towards just not sending anything – and expressing your thanks by not popping up one more thing on their Blackberry or one more item in their inbox for them to delete.

So, if you’ve forwarded me an interesting article recently or answered some question with a quick helpful one-liner response and didn’t hear back – Thanks!

A while back I wrote about my email and inbox thesis.  Today Michael Arrington posted about the 2,433 unread emails he has and the problems he has dealing with emails in general.  Well, we’ve already solved a lot of those problems with ClearContext IMS by automatically prioritizing emails for people as well as automating the process of processing and organizing all those emails.  In our upcoming release that is currently in the testing cycle, we go beyond emails, tasks, and appointments to also help people manage the contacts related to a project and all the documents that pass through their inbox.

I want to highlight a couple of specific points Michael makes:

"I scan the from and subject fields for high payoff messages." – NO, NO, NO!  Nobody with any volume can do that and stay on top of email.  By analyzing your email history and all sorts of contextual clues about incoming email, this is something that can be done automatically
– and we do. 

"I currently have 2,433 unread emails in my inbox." – You’re not alone, we hear this all the time.  But combining technology with an email management process, that’s a problem that can be solved.  Here’s what people are saying: "In 3 days, I had reduced my 600+ inbox (and all new emails received in those 3 days) to ZERO!"  "When I first installed the program I had exactly 688 messages in my
inbox! Now, I’ve neatly organized it into manageable topic folders
& threads."  "My inbox is down to 0 from a starting point of about 7,500." "…I have gone from having over 1 thousand old emails in my inbox… to
having just this mornings emails in there. I can’t tell you how
refreshing it feels."  That’s all without resorting to "email bankruptcy" or anything like that.

"If I knew what that solution was, I’d quit this blog and go do it." – We’re on the lookout for smart new team members!  Call me.

"Drop by my house and tell me all about it." – OK, seeya soon.

We’ve started out with the biggest business communication medium and application – email and Outlook.  But there’s a whole world of messaging that our solutions apply to and we look forward to incorporating all of those information streams into our solutions.  When it comes to information overload, things are only going to get worse.  But we’re here to make them better.