#3 is a doozie, and we've been working on it at Greplin. I think we can break it down into some subcategories:
* Notification emails that are very time-specific in their relevance. "Reminder: Coffee with Chuck at 3:25 today" or "Thank you for your reservation for a party of 4 at Alice's Restaurant at 7:30 tonight." You care about these a lot, until you have coffee with Chuck and abruptly stop caring.
* Things that are nice to have pass through your consciousness at some point. Amazon shipping confirmation emails, GitHub comment notifications, etc. Interestingly, most of these are mostly noise; when I get an Amazon confirmation email, the part I care about could fit in a Tweet: "Your Dromiceiomimus Plushie has shipped via USPS, with tracking number 54989086, and will arrive between Tuesday and Friday".
* Mailing lists. I have Gmail set up to tag all these and skip my inbox, which seems to be about right. The weird thing about mailing list emails is that almost all of them are explicitly marked as such -- there are several unofficial MIME headers for this -- and yet the default behavior for every email client I know if is to simply stick them in the inbox like any other email.
* Crap I don't care about. "Save up to 25% on useless ornamental doilies!!!1". The only part of this that I care about is the Unsubscribe link. I believe Gmail can auto-unsubscribe you if you mark these as spam.
Of course, while it's fine to break it down like this, the trouble starts when you start trying to actually extract useful information from emails so you can present users with a better view of their inbox. It's officially a Hard Problem, though like a lot of hard problems, you can get something useful with a lot less effort than getting something perfect.
What would you like from your inbox? For obvious reasons, I'm very interested. :-)
For me, "coffee with Chuck" is #2 rather than #3 and yes, I want it in my inbox (maybe simply stay there until it happens, then archive it automatically).
Your other examples are clearly #3... and I don't need to read any of those emails.
Amazon confirmation emails are completely useless since Amazon always ships on time; in the exceptional case where a package doesn't arrive, I can go fetch the tracking number somewhere to investigate; but reading these for every package is a waste of time.
Mailing lists should go to a special folder labelled "things to read on a rainy day".
And finally "crap" is spam, no?
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What about a service that would let you give a special email address for Amazon confirmation emails, for example, that would receive these emails and index and categorize them. When a package doesn't arrive you go there to look for the tracking number, but only then.
Of course you can do that with tags in Gmail.
What you can't do in Gmail is to generate a single PDF of all proforma received from a given provider, for example.
Comments
#3 is a doozie, and we've been working on it at Greplin. I think we can break it down into some subcategories:
* Notification emails that are very time-specific in their relevance. "Reminder: Coffee with Chuck at 3:25 today" or "Thank you for your reservation for a party of 4 at Alice's Restaurant at 7:30 tonight." You care about these a lot, until you have coffee with Chuck and abruptly stop caring.
* Things that are nice to have pass through your consciousness at some point. Amazon shipping confirmation emails, GitHub comment notifications, etc. Interestingly, most of these are mostly noise; when I get an Amazon confirmation email, the part I care about could fit in a Tweet: "Your Dromiceiomimus Plushie has shipped via USPS, with tracking number 54989086, and will arrive between Tuesday and Friday".
* Mailing lists. I have Gmail set up to tag all these and skip my inbox, which seems to be about right. The weird thing about mailing list emails is that almost all of them are explicitly marked as such -- there are several unofficial MIME headers for this -- and yet the default behavior for every email client I know if is to simply stick them in the inbox like any other email.
* Crap I don't care about. "Save up to 25% on useless ornamental doilies!!!1". The only part of this that I care about is the Unsubscribe link. I believe Gmail can auto-unsubscribe you if you mark these as spam.
Of course, while it's fine to break it down like this, the trouble starts when you start trying to actually extract useful information from emails so you can present users with a better view of their inbox. It's officially a Hard Problem, though like a lot of hard problems, you can get something useful with a lot less effort than getting something perfect.
What would you like from your inbox? For obvious reasons, I'm very interested. :-)
For me, "coffee with Chuck" is #2 rather than #3 and yes, I want it in my inbox (maybe simply stay there until it happens, then archive it automatically).
Your other examples are clearly #3... and I don't need to read any of those emails.
Amazon confirmation emails are completely useless since Amazon always ships on time; in the exceptional case where a package doesn't arrive, I can go fetch the tracking number somewhere to investigate; but reading these for every package is a waste of time.
Mailing lists should go to a special folder labelled "things to read on a rainy day".
And finally "crap" is spam, no?
- - -
What about a service that would let you give a special email address for Amazon confirmation emails, for example, that would receive these emails and index and categorize them. When a package doesn't arrive you go there to look for the tracking number, but only then.
Of course you can do that with tags in Gmail.
What you can't do in Gmail is to generate a single PDF of all proforma received from a given provider, for example.
Re: mailing lists. I think RFC 2919 is pretty official. List-ID is registered at IANA permanent message header field registry.
Has Greplin basically solved inbox being a todo list?