Two Minute Rule: Intelligent Email Clients Needed

Fernando gives some more commentary on how technology has failed us in the area of email:

Some of us have been doing a bit of work on tools for helping manage email. Just a beginning. I totally agree that dropping any email that needs more than 2 minutes to respond is filtering all worthwhile thought from your exchanges, maybe from your day. What I would like is a convenient way to slow down email, especially the kind of email that doesn't need much thought. For example, I'd like an adaptive delay for my outgoing replies. If an outgoing reply is delayed by 8 hours, the reply to the reply will arrive tomorrow. Of course, some replies I want to go out right away. that's why intelligence and adaptation are needed for this purpose.

In addition, I think that one of the big problems with email is there is no direct relationship between the time stamp on an email and when the sender expects or requires a reply. This can be inferred in part by various priority settings, but these are easy to ignore and often mean different things to different people  (an ontological commitment problem if ever there was one!). Perhaps analysis of the content as well as past interactions with the sender could be used to provide a better sorting function...

Comments

[Greg Linden]

Hey, Matthew. Have you seen the old Priorities project at Microsoft Research under Eric Horvitz?

http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/attend.htm

"We dwell on the problem of inferring the expected criticality of email and discuss work on the Priorities system, centering on prioritizing email by criticality and modulating the communication of notifications to users about the presence and nature of incoming email."

It's old (1999), but I really like that work. I'd love to see more in the same direction, something that eventually makes it out to all of our e-mail clients.

[Beautiful Minds]

hmm.. prioritising and sendin/ receiving email.. I think that is a lil difficult but may be will be a reality soon..