Social filters on your inbox
March 23, 2008
Michael Arrington posted a fresh lament about the state of his inbox. He’s got 2400+ emails in his inbox right now, and he will likely nuke them all and start over (yet again) shortly. This got me to thinking (yet again!) about email/spam/inboxes. The article rightly pointed out that right now we only have ’spam’ and ‘not spam’ in most email filters. Perhaps some systems like I’m about to describe already exist, but I haven’t seen them yet, or heard of them.
In a nutshell, I’m envisioning a filtering system that would apply filters based on the ‘from’ email (validated to whatever extent you can with SPF-type systems). The filter would consult your address book and analyze your behaviour with that person before. If you routinely reply to bob@aol.com within a few minutes of receiving emails from bob, the filter would apply certain flags/labels to that email, perhaps things like “urgent” or “frequent contact” or something like that. Your email program would then allow you to construct views based on those labels.
However, I’m envisioning taking that a step further, as most email systems have a rather limited view of your ‘address book’. Merge in your social media contacts via their feeds, and you have another set of data to filter against. If I get an email (or generic incoming message routed through this ’system’) from someone I follow on Twitter, then a ’someone I follow’ flag/label is applied to the message. If I’m following a corporate blog and get email from someone at that company, it gets another flag/label, and so on…
There are likely a dozen or more logical holes in this I might be missing, but at a conceptual level this sort of thing will eventually be built, I’m pretty sure. We’ve only seen ’social media’ *really* take hold in the last couple of year, so I’m not too surprised that this concept hasn’t gone mainstream, but I do think it will. And it might not end up being applied *just* to email - the ‘inbox of the future’ might end up looking something like friendfeed.com (I hope not from a visual standpoint) for a majority of people.
What do you think?
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March 23rd, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Michael,
My company has been focused on this for a while. Check out my response to TechCrunch at http://www.emaildashboard.com.
“The filter would consult your address book and analyze your behaviour with that person before. … Your email program would then allow you to construct views based on those labels.”
That’s basically what our ClearContext IMS product does with inbox views already for Outlook users - more platforms definitely on the way.
“However, I’m envisioning taking that a step further, as most email systems have a rather limited view of your ‘address book’.”
Your ideas re: other inputs to help identify the nature and importance of email are very valid. And if you extend it a level, you can make it a two-way thing. What do I mean? Well, as you say, if someone’s email address is related to a corporate blog, then most likely the communication has something to do with that company. On the reverse side, if I get a Facebook feed or Twitter or other online communication, by looking at my email history, the site/app can see how important that person is to me and highlight the message accordingly.
As our interactions with overlapping groups of contacts span more and more types of communication, there are more and more contextual clues available to us to help identify and process them in a more intelligent and efficient way. And with the increasing volume of communication, that’s not a nice thing, it’s a requirement.
March 23rd, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Yeah Deva, I saw your product. It looks a lot like what I was thinking of, at least as a first iteration (in my mind!). Do you have plans for non-outlook users? On the ‘2 way’ idea - yeah, that definitely makes sense.
The only drawback I can think of is that for many people there’s still a learning curve for the system to learn each person’s histories. Well, I guess not, to the extent that the ’sent’ messages could be used. Tracking interaction history across multiple systems would prove tricky - if I change companies, my history of dealing with ‘bob’ is lost when I move to a new company, for example. At least it would if you’re focusing on corporate mail systems. Coming up with a way to address the person/individual market and make this portable would be fantastic.
March 23rd, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Michael,
We definitely have plans for non-Outlook users, but we’ve found that the level of pain is the highest in traditional business email users - which more often than not means Outlook and Exchange, so that’s where we’ve started.
The bigger and more complete solution we envision is one that lives at a higher level than any individual messaging system/platform. Once you’re using the same system across multiple messaging systems, then even if you’re no longer using something like a corporate Exchange system, other systems you use (Twitter, AIM, GMail, etc.) will already know about the level of importance those contacts have. So, abstracting these concepts to a higher level across multiple messaging systems definitely is something that would help with portability.
March 24th, 2008 at 8:56 am
This can be accomplished rather easily with X-headers. If you apply some procmail and formail rules to do it for you. I don’t know if it’s as easy to do on an Exchange server, some custom code would need to be written for that. (Then, how do you analyze personal pst’s?) But if your email is kept on an imap server, and governed by procmail and formail… This is easily accomplished.
March 24th, 2008 at 9:05 am
@Joel
It’s not the actual filtering I’m that concerned about - whether X-header are used or something else or whatever (though I agree it seems a ‘natural’ choice given the history of email and processing thus far). The bigger concern is how to come up with those labels/tags/whatever to stick in the X-headers in the first place. Given the disparity of email systems out there, and the disparity of address book formats (and I’m also thinking about the feeds idea and such) it’s a daunting task.
March 24th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Another thought - why do all email clients only allow you to look at one message at a time? Yes, we get ’snippets’ in gmail and I think outlook offers something similar, but they’re only partial.
What I’m thinking of is a mode in email clients that would show you 4-8 small message areas that you could browse. One button would let you trash them all, or apply a label to all of them, or perform some other group/bulk action.