Email is screwed up.
Not that email as a method of communication is screwed but more the fact that the software we use to manage the ever increasing amount of email we get is brain dead and next to ineffectual in letting us control our information flow. Sure companies like Xobni and ClearContext are trying to give us ways to get a handle on it all but they are more interested in riding the wave of social networking of everything we do rather than trying to fix the root problem.
The real problem is that our email software is basically nothing more than a dumping ground that we pretend we have a handle on it all when in reality we are willing to declare email bankruptcy faster than a stripper sheds her g-string. In the 20 plus years that email has been the backbone of our information flow the software used to jokingly manage it hasn’t progressed beyond being anything more than the pony express of our cyber lives.
Not even taking into account our totally ineffectual fight against the spam that clogs our information pipeline our email software is in desperate need of some serious rethinking and not just making it an extension of the current craze of socializing everything. Ethan Kaplan had a good post about this need to have our email management tools to grow up and actually let us be productive
One thing that I’ve noticed is that the linear fashion that e-mail and indeed all web-based information comes in is not condusive to prioritization in any way. I can’t understand why no e-mail client, and no RSS client has yet implemented, seamlessly, some bayesian clustering algorithm. It’d auto-group threads of messages and group those threads according to implicit thematics. You would be able to weight whether to group more by sender, by subject, by lexical analysis, etc.
The same would apply to RSS.
Ethan’s post was sparked by an equally excellent post by Tim Ferriss where he discusses ways in which you can gain some control over you email with the current state of email software. However as good as Tim’s post might be it really is just a stopgap that helps you avoid email bankruptcy for a little longer.
What we need is to seriously rethink the whole concept of what an email client; or better yet an information flow manager is and how it functions in an environment of ever increasing influx of ways to get our information.
Conversation Tags: email, information management, software
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