A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email

So if both sender and recipient are using this, they'll end up demanding increasing classifications from each other in an infinite loop?<p>I think the actual solution will turn out to be something like this <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000</a><p>The important difference is that the master copy of the email resides at the sender, which means it is possible for them to update and revise it. With current SMTP the moment send is hit, the message is gone which is why band aids like this inboxpro approach exist.<p>For example I could imagine adding a header to emails that gives a canonical url for it and some cryptographic information as well as the original body. If the recipient is using regular SMTP and mail clients then things remain as today. If they are using the new system then the recipient client can make requests for updates, give queue time information, ask for tagging etc and automatically reflect those changes in what it shows.

A comment that I feel very strongly about. First, let me say the primary thesis of adding structure (and asking your senders to add structure on their own) is a great idea. My email inbox took a quantum leap when I simply structured all emails into one of two types: 1) emails from people I care about and need to respond to quickly + emails from people I don't know. 2) Everything else, including all newsletters, email lists, etc.<p>However, I have to strongly object to the expired emails feature. The worst part about being an entrepreneur are the people that never reply back. Not a yes. Not a no. Rejection I can handle. But the people who stop responding or never responded create a lot of heartburn in my life. And the same goes for trying to maintain a social life. Having an acquaintance or new friend never respond to an invite for coffee or a beer is incredibly frustrating.<p>Any system that would increase the number of emails that go unresponded to is a bad system.<p>How about instead, you reply by saying "too busy right now, maybe check back with me in 6 weeks?" I've found that cuts down dramatically on the number of unwanted requests. People that really care will check back. Others won't. And you can always escalate the rejection from there.

&#62; <i>... none of these solutions try to stop stuff from arriving in the first place...</i><p>While I don't agree with this particular "frighteningly ambitious" take on the issue I do agree with that the above quote represents an issue that needs solving. In my opinion, forcing the sender to conform their email to a format of your choosing simply isn't scalable. The reason email is so well used today is because it's so simple to use. This adds a layer of complexity to the people trying to communicate with you that I think would just lead to fewer people attempting to communicate with you (which could in fact be what you want).<p>I've spent some time building my own "frighteningly ambitious" solution (I'm actually planing on doing a Show HN on Monday or Tuesday). Essentially, the idea is that right now it's the people emailing you that control your inbox. Our solution is to give users control over when and from whom they receive email. It puts you in <i>actual</i> control over you inbox for the first time. For those interested check out <a href="https://lightermail.com" rel="nofollow">https://lightermail.com</a>. Would love to get your opinion.

There used to be a mail provider (EarthLink?) that automatically responded with a message saying I had to click on a link to get my email past their spam filters. I found that infuriating. I can imagine getting one of these automatic responses might cause similar negative reactions - that the person using Inbox Pro is a little bit of a primadonna.<p>Having said that, I still signed up for the beta. Because I'm a primadonna.

This is an interesting way to coax contextual metadata from senders. However, for certain senders I will <i>always</i> respond promptly and thoughtfully, regardless of message formatting. Senders such as friends, family, clients, etc. Which makes the auto-reply a bit tricky:<p><i>Thank you "motherpowers" for sending the email titled "Happy Birthday" to "leepowers". For a faster response time please re-formulate your birthday greeting as a series of yes/no questions and re-send.</i><p>So being able to whitelist senders would be a requirement.<p><i>My dream is that in a few months I will open my Inbox Pro app in the morning and answer 20 Yes/No questions using just my left thumb...</i><p>I'm not sure what this would accomplish. Reading and comprehending email is not difficult. The difficult part is thinking through an inquiry and responding intelligently. "Can we move up the launch date a week?" This is a yes/no question that anyone can understand. But actually exploring an <i>answer</i> to this question can require considerable mental effort. There's very little utility in having this message display in a slightly different format with a checkbox.

Nothing ambitious was mentioned in that article. And if you want a to-do list you should check out something like trello.com Otherwise, a spiral notebook and a pen is a great deal better than your inbox as a to-do list.<p>--Please feel free to ignore the following email rant.--<p>Email is a pretty impressive digital translation of the written letter. And for cases where a letter written by hand on paper would work well, email works even better. As long as by better you mean faster and without paper or stamps or penmanship. The SMTP protocol is over 30 years old and still going strong; that's pretty amazing. But email kind of sucks, too.<p>Frankly, most people aren't good at writing letters. Simply creating a meaningful subject line is difficult. And keeping a conversation germane to the stated subject is also difficult; folks often talk about multiple topics in a typical conversation. To review long conversations, one must read awkwardly from bottom to top, opposite normal English reading direction. Adding someone to a conversation in progress is also awkward. Sending another message (a correction or addition to your last message) before the person (or people) you're talking with replies creates confusion as a reply can only be made to one or the other message, dropping parts of the conversation. Attachments can be problematic. Clearly, spam the likes of which we see today was never anticipated by SMTP's authors, and neither has anyone come up with an especially successful solution to it. We've all just come to accept spam as part of the background noise, filtering the polluted stream, rather than removing the decomposing carcasses from the upstream source.<p>Creating an alternative that addresses its shortcomings would be ambitious. And I think many people were frightened by Wave, which addressed many of email's shortcomings but was disruptive in the way so many people like to claim they admire but will almost always shun in practice (kind of like how folks always claim to love to root for the underdog, unless it's Haiti). I'm not saying Wave was perfect, but it had great potential. And as far as genuinely ambitious attempts at improving email (or the kind of conversing we typically do with email), I can't think of another example.

I think email is the ultimate form of bad skeumorphism. It was designed to mimic postal mail. Email addresses, no permissions, no true id checks, no punishment for abuse. Many of the now used features like spam folders, filters, encryption, receipts were just tacked on (poorly). And because it's a "worldwide standard" that no one controls it's impossible for someone with a vision to try and change email.<p>I say abandon "fixing email" and come up with a new solution altogether. Start with a clean slate. Form a coop or nonprofit foundation that will control the standard for 5-10 years until everything's ironed out, then release the source code so people and providers can use it to replace email and people don't have to depend on one group of people. At this point I'm willing to try anything, as I'm sick of email, I HATE it with every fiber of my being. Spam and delayed newsletter bombing is taking up hours of my time each week.

<p><pre><code> If you let a coder (or, *shudder*, a user) specify the importance of her alert, give her a little pull-down menu that has choices ranging from "nice to know" to "white-hot urgent," and nine times out of ten, she'll choose "NOW NOW NOW URGENT ZOMGWEREALLGONNADIE!" </code></pre> - Cory Doctorow, <i>Epoch</i>

I tried it out by sending him an email.<p>Interestingly enough, the average response time for a yes/no question is by far the longest (5 days vs 3 days for a long email).<p>Shouldn't responding to simple yes/no be much faster than reading a long message?

Interesting, but might be a hard sell to already email overloaded people now having to categorize outgoing mail. They might now even get an extra auto-reply mail for every mail they send.<p>There is also a emotional aspect in terms of everybody being told very explicitly that they are not important enough for an immediate reply.<p>In the worst case, a sender gets a message saying "that email you sent to Tom last week has been auto deleted. You can resubmit and maybe Tom will adress it later". It might be the honest truth, but I can't imagine a lot of people, especially customers or managers, would enjoy such a message.<p>As mentioned there is interesting elements, but ultimately it seems too engineer oriented and with a bad user experience for senders.

IMHO there is something valuable here.<p>One of the problems with emails is that the sender don't understand what is happening to the receiver in terms of added work to perform, so this adds the feedback needed to the system.<p>About the "expire" feature, it is a lot of time I think gmail should have something like that. "Sorry this email remained in the user inbox for N days, the user was not able to reply so please send it again if it is important, or make it shorter and easier to reply for the user by improving it".<p>Btw I'm part of the problem as I tend to write very long emails. That's the issue. Emails should be short, and conceived so that the sender will have an easy time to reply something meaningful using a small fraction of his/her time.<p>That's probably more of a cultural problem than a technological one. However when I realized email was going to kill my productivity I stopped replying to most of the messages that hit my inbox.

"These are all tools to sort and file more stuff, but none of these solutions try to stop stuff from arriving in the first place. Or to find the email you really want to receive between all the other stuff."<p>Hmmm...I use gmail to filter stuff I don't really need to read right away ("filter messages like this"), and priority inbox is specifically to find the email you really want to read between all of the other stuff. Why straw-man the competition?<p>In any case, there is definitely room for email "types" (tags, labels, etc.) that can be implemented in custom x-headers and then get added to the right inbox/queue.<p>The communication back to the sender is an interesting thing though. If the sender is using something like this, and they autorespond...

I do not thing email is broken, nor do I think it's a todo list. In fact it's my favorite part of the internet. But y'all go ahead.

Where on the queue do auto response messages from other inboxes protected by Frighteningly Ambitious Queue system messages land?

The first thing I thought of when I read this title was Paul Graham's essay about startup ideas. I'm glad the title succeeded in that sense, as it's relevant to this article.<p>More to the point, I like this idea. I like that it focuses on the perspective of those who send you emails. I feel that many people trying to solve this idea would look to changing how inboxes handle messages or look to changing the user interface of email systems.<p>But instead, this solution actually helps reduce email by responding to senders. That's a unique approach. Very out of the box.<p>But it's true that it's "frighteningly ambitious" to try and tackle this problem on the sender's side. I could see this failing if the majority of senders are the type to simply send off an email and not check for a while, which would ignore the automated message query. However, if a majority of users do pay attention to it, they can edit their email options and hopefully make life easier for the receiver.<p>Excellent idea. I hope it develops into a full startup.

The addition that I think would make it scalable and worthwhile is to establish an interoperability standard via mail headers. Broadcast you're using this system with X-UsesMailTickets so that compatible clients can pre-fill their emails with "X-MailTicketType: Yes/No", etc.

Sounds like he reinvented email as a standard "ticket system" complete with queues and auto-responses.

I think that most emails (probably all human relationships) can be described by the "who needs this more - sender or recipient?" paradigm (in the parlance of Seinfeld - who has the hand). An example - if a subordinate is emailing his boss, the subordinate needs the boss to read &#38; respond.<p>This solution would seem to work in cases when the recipient has the power in the relationship. But what about the other X% when he's the underling? Wouldn't the cost of pissing off those individuals outweigh the benefit of increased productivity?<p>In other words - it can probably work for Bill Gates, but not for the rest of us.

This is a push notification system - it turns the recipient's problem into the sender's. This is fine if communicating across a hierarchy or for a public address. It could be obnoxious, however, with peers, particularly those outside tech.<p>Consider, instead, a pull notification system. The first time a sender emails the recipient they are sent a link (also in the recipient's signature) to a page providing expected response times for various email forms along with the option to convert your already-sent email into a short-response form, e.g. yes/no.

I doubt a day goes by without someone embarking on an email replacement. No doubt there are many things that could be improved but I've always felt that viewing email as a todo list is symptomatic of the reactive mindset that generates a lot of stress.<p>In many work environments email is used to shuttle the responsibility for tasks between people. We've all felt that relief on sending an email. You feel like you've performed a valuable task, made some progress in work that may have very few visible milestones. As the recipient we tend to take the same view and feel as if each email adds to our list of work. Some imaginary clock starts ticking when you receive the email and stops only when you reply.<p>I think the first thing you need to do is remove the implied hand-over that comes with and email. Remind yourself that just because the sender sent an email, it doesn't mean you must do anything about it. Take a step back and think about what it is you need to achieve and then look to your email to support those activities.

I think this is a great start to solving what has evolved into a real world problem. However, I think that this idea needs to be explored further. As others have indicated, the resulting User Experience for the Sender is not that great. The time investment requirement has shifted from the Receiver to the Sender, which does not really solve the problem. I think a truly elegant solution to this problem will lower the time investment for both the Sender and the Receiver. So with this said, I like the approach, and I think Boris is half way there (with a strong focus on the Receiving End at this point).<p>If it were my project, I would now brainstorm and focus on how to make the User Experience better on the Sender end. He mentions that he plans to eventually have an iPhone/Android App (aka UI of some sort on the Senders End), which I think is a 'must' in terms of facilitating a good User Experience for the Sender.

Yep.<p><a href="http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/3313/imagekm.png" rel="nofollow">http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/3313/imagekm.png</a><p>Give more power to benevolent senders. I've had similar thoughts.<p>I don't want to waste other people's time, but the current email protocol forces me to. There is no way to specify if your email is...<p>1. "Check this out sometime during the week, it's funny stuff, if you have time. You need a 24"+ screen and 10 mins, so don't even look at this email on your phone"<p>2. "I NEED A REPLY ASAP, ARE YOU THERE?"<p>It appears as a (1) on your phone and I have no power over that to make things easier for the recipient... (other than perhaps send an email at a specific time which is less likely to interrupt your work)

I believe one reason people like instant messaging is that with IM you are kind of constantly having a converstation. It is very much ok to skip the "handshake" and go directly to point. "Lunch 12:30?" "Yes".<p>Email clients could offer instant messaging style interface for this kind of messages. Instead of seeing list of subjects, then selecting a message etc you would directly see the actual question and just answer it.

I feel like Mailbox (that new iPhone app) provides EXACTLY this, except in a much more elegant package. Email as a to-do list is pretty brilliant.

Perhaps I missed it, but what is the implementation? Is it a web interface which reads gmail? Is it a web-based email @inboxpro.com? I can see a lot of benefit to the features listed, but I can see a big target market where the individual has no choice over mail provider, namely an enterprise exchange host.

The left 25% of the page is useless, and has a flashing corporate logo, FFS! The page is also setup so I can't zoom the page. If your site design is crippled for tablet users, to the point I'm forced to use "Reader," this is an interesting symptom and datapoint, but not one I'm sure you'd like.

An alternate way is to just abandon email altogether. See, for example, the #noemail movement:<p><a href="http://prezi.com/w5if2h-bcbcd/ncsu-noemail-why-you-couldshouldmust-use-better-ways-of-communicating-than-email/" rel="nofollow">http://prezi.com/w5if2h-bcbcd/ncsu-noemail-why-you-couldshou...</a>

This isn't a new inbox or a new email. It's a personal assistant designed with the constraints of software in mind, similar to harmonia.io. Maybe you'll get the Four Hour Work Week folks to buy in. Good job!

I love this idea. I would love to play around with it.