11 ms·

Declaring Email Bankruptcy

26 points by cwan 17y ago

mootothemax 17y ago
Doesn't bankruptcy imply a lack of emails? ;) When it comes to dealing with spam, I'm often tempted to change my email address of ten years and start off with a blank slate. I'm genuinely curious to see how long it would take to ramp up. I rarely hand out my [myname]@example.com address, instead using [companyname]@example.com - so, amazon or somedodgywebsite@example.com and then filtering spam depending on that. Is it time to start over?
- hga 17y ago
  Think of email as bills, which need to be paid/responded to.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
jplewicke 17y ago
Have there been any email clients/plugins that used Bayesian filtering to sort non-spam email into different categories successfully? For example, is there anything out there that would let Fred Wilson automatically tag all the emails he gets from entrepeneurs asking him to check out their sites and invest in their companies?
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Gmail has some features that work like that.
  - pqs 17y ago
    That's not true. Gmail has good filters, but it does not have bayesian learning (appart from the spam filtering).
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      Ah ok, so labeling is only based on the filter contents and not on previous emails that were labeled with a certain tag. That's weird, they use the exact same tech for the spam, why not apply it to the 'good' mail as well?
      - jgrahamc 17y ago
        Perhaps I should start selling POPFile + GMail as a service? I wonder how much people would pay for me to have POPFile magically label their gmail messages for them. Especially since GMail allows OAuth access via IMAP.
        pqs 17y ago
        I once had a computer running all the time to run POPFile and filter my Gmail messages through IMAP. At that time POPFile+IMAP was not very stable and POPFile would crash often. And also, it was a pain to have a computer running all the time at home only for this. Then, there was another problem. POPFile would run every two or five minutes, so when I opened Gmail I used to find not yet filtered mails in the inbox. If you make a webservice that does this right, I will consider using it. Now I'm using Opera Mail, which is very nice, but the training is local and, therefore, I don't have the same filters and training at home and at the office, which is rather painful, sometimes. I'm sure there is a succesfull business behind this.
        jgrahamc 17y ago
        Well, I probably wouldn't use POPFile itself for this anyway because I have a blindingly fast C version of the same classification techniques called polymail which I license to people. Would just have to graft on the IMAP part. Hmm. Evening project? Clearly, the not yet filtered bit is a nuisance, that's why you really want it to be built into your mail client.
- pqs 17y ago
  Yes, there is, the mail client integrated in Opera Mail does this: "Learn from messages added to or removed from filter: allow Opera Mail to train itself into recognizing which messages belong in the filter, and which do not. This can act as a substitute for adding rules, or in addition to the rules. It learns from the messages you remove or add." http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/mail/sort/ http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/mail/sort/ I love this feature. It is also possible to use POPFile with any client and IMAP server. http://getpopfile.org/ http://getpopfile.org/
- jgrahamc 17y ago
  Well, there was this thing I wrote like 10 years ago called POPFile (http://getpopfile.org/ http://getpopfile.org/) when I had the problems that he is talking about. I haven't looked back. POPFile grew from POP only to lots of other protocols and many, many people still use it.
  - chime 17y ago
    POPFile is awesome. Definitely one of the most useful email apps I've ever used. Thanks for all your work behind it.
    - jgrahamc 17y ago
      You are most welcome and I'll pass on your praise to the people who keep POPFile alive and growing today.
  - patio11 17y ago
    Wait, you're THAT jgrahamc?! Whoa, small world. I nearly invited you to speak in Japan about POPFile and OSS at the technology incubator that was my ex-ex-day job, but our budget fell through. As far as I know our not-quite-ready-for-primetime POPFile/Outlook integration is still protecting a few hundred desktops next to a rice field.
    - jgrahamc 17y ago
      Whoa. Are you talking about QuickPOPFile? I would have happily come to Japan and spoken, I've been there before and always loved the place.
      - patio11 17y ago
        QuickPOPFile was not quite us, but the general idea to make it useful for non-technical folks was similar. (We were going to aggregate filtering across an organization, on the assumption that most folks couldn't be bothered to train emails. Turns out this is easier to do if you are Google than if you want to run a parallel mail infrastructure alongside the one that actually delivers mail.)
- joshuabaer 17y ago
  We're doing this at OtherInbox.com with our Organizer solution. I saw another company doing this in the TC50 demo pit last year but I can't remember the name. Most of our Organizer logic starts with heuristic matches on the From address and other headers in the message, but we're also testing out Bayesian filtering on the message bodies to identify other traits and train the system. Joshua Baer | @joshuabaer
chime 17y ago
Why not get a secretary? If email is the lifeline to your work-life then it makes sense to pay someone $15/hr on a part-time basis to deal with the chaos. A capable assistant can very easily organize your email saving you the time to do what you do best. Maybe there is an opportunity here for a web-based solution to this problem. Of course he doesn't want to give someone access to his gmail account. So maybe there's a way to selectively allow someone access to your inbox folder with auditing/logging/organizing features. This way someone else can manage your inbox but not go around snooping for password reset emails.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Email can be pretty personal, and in the end someone will have to answer it. He's not even getting that much mail, if you count it out he says that 'from the beginning of April to the first week of may' he went from a few hundred to an unmanageable thousand. That's only about 30 messages per day, if he simply kept up with it it would not be an issue. Once the mountain is high enough it can be very intimidating. Imagine not washing the dishes for a full month. edit: changed spam in to mail, the point still stands.
  - chime 17y ago
    You have a point about the low volume at 30/day. I've had 100+ emails a day in the past for long periods so I understand how bad it can get once things pile up. President of our company gets 100+ emails a day and could surely use some help. I've met quite a few good administrative assistants and they are aware of how trustworthy and reliable they have to be. They can just glance over an email body and if it sounds really personal, put it into the "personal" bucket. They can also reply to emails that just need a "Thanks" and forward other emails to appropriate people as necessary. If they take notes, they can describe all their activities to the mailbox owner in a few minutes. I'm just saying as good as computers/apps have become, a second set of eyes and hands can still make a busy CEO's life easier.
  - aquark 17y ago
    We don't know how many emails a day he was dealing with. Clearly, he wasn't ignoring email over this period, so many he was already keeping up with 30, 50, 100, 200 emails and this was just the excess.
jacquesm 17y ago
Looks like someone is in the need of better spam filters. Just for fun I disabled the spam filter on our mailserver for a few minutes a while ago, took me hours to clean up afterwards. The spam volumes are simply unbelievable, but with proper filtering it really isn't that much of a problem. I think I get about 20 to 30 spam messages per day nowadays that somehow make it past the filter. I do update the filter rules with every message that gets through though, usually on subject or body keywords.
- mstevens 17y ago
  It sounds like his problem is too many nonspam emails. Which presumably wouldn't be helped by spam filtering!
- tuxychandru 17y ago
  But he says they're all non-spam mails.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Ah yes, my bad! thanks! But that's only 30 emails per day!! Where do I sign for that?
    - chime 17y ago
      > Where do I sign for that? If you want fewer emails, you need to stop signing up willy-nilly.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        Nah, most of the email I get is because I've built up a fairly extensive net of personal contacts over the years and email (rather than say facebook or so) is my preferred way of staying in touch. The contacts are both business, private and 'mixed', and I really don't mind the volume, it's just that 30 sounds like a great number. I reply to emails usually very quickly (unless I'm sleeping), even if they are a bit more complicated because I know that if I let it slide the 'mountain' will start to look too high to me to. It's mostly a matter of discipline.
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
>But the more efficient I get with email, the more of it that comes in. Jevons Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
iamelgringo 17y ago
Please someone make email better! This is a huge problem. Gmail is okay, and it's the best web mail out there. Filters are really pretty useful, but as far as I'm concerned, Gmail's two great innovations were 1) it's approach to threaded conversations. IMHO it's "The Right Way" to do it and 2) archiving email as opposed to deleting it. But, it seems like they've really stopped innovating, and it really leaves a lot to be desired. Labs features are nice, but not really game changers. Gmail's contact management sucks. I have hundreds of contacts in my contacts list from running the Hackers and Founders meetups, and I try really hard to write notes and metadata about each contact after I meet them, but it's really hard to get at those notes from an individual email. Xobni really has the right idea with this. If I could easily change the display of emails to threaded conversations ala Gmail and easily get the archive feature, I'd make the switch over to Xobni + Outlook in a heart beat. I'm more than willing to pay $10 -20 a month to someone that can solve this problem for me....
- lamby 17y ago
  Have you looked at the newer generation of text-based clients? The main one thrown around is http://notmuchmail.org/ http://notmuchmail.org/
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- carbocation 17y ago
  Thunderbird allows both threading and archival.
rabidgnat 17y ago
Keeping your email under control requires an unreasonable amount of discipline. I've managed to avoid 'defaulting' on my email so far, but at a decent overhead rate: Every hour or two, I wipe out my inbox completely and leave only items that absolutely require an action. Most mail is read once and interesting email gets archived by sender name. I have lots of filters set up for people who usually send me uninteresting mail. Everything else is deleted. I've almost lost control a few times - mostly because of vacations- and I'm certain that I'll hit a tipping point where my time doesn't scale to my inbox size. I couldn't handle my boss' email load, for instance... Are there any good techniques that scale for dealing with email?
- AlisdairO 17y ago
  Some email, you absolutely need to respond to immediately, and fair enough. For anything that isn't totally urgent, try replying a day or two later. You can stick a reply in a draft folder and fill it out later. This slows down the flow of new email: it cuts out the sorts of mail where you're going back and forth several times in the same day.

26 points by cwan 17y ago

Doesn't bankruptcy imply a lack of emails? ;) When it comes to dealing with spam, I'm often tempted to change my email address of ten years and start off with a blank slate. I'm genuinely curious to see how long it would take to ramp up. I rarely hand out my [myname]@example.com address, instead using [companyname]@example.com - so, amazon or somedodgywebsite@example.com and then filtering spam depending on that. Is it time to start over?

hga 17y ago
Think of email as bills, which need to be paid/responded to.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

jplewicke 17y ago

Have there been any email clients/plugins that used Bayesian filtering to sort non-spam email into different categories successfully? For example, is there anything out there that would let Fred Wilson automatically tag all the emails he gets from entrepeneurs asking him to check out their sites and invest in their companies?

jacquesm 17y ago
Gmail has some features that work like that.
- pqs 17y ago
  That's not true. Gmail has good filters, but it does not have bayesian learning (appart from the spam filtering).
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Ah ok, so labeling is only based on the filter contents and not on previous emails that were labeled with a certain tag. That's weird, they use the exact same tech for the spam, why not apply it to the 'good' mail as well?
    - jgrahamc 17y ago
      Perhaps I should start selling POPFile + GMail as a service? I wonder how much people would pay for me to have POPFile magically label their gmail messages for them. Especially since GMail allows OAuth access via IMAP.
      - pqs 17y ago
        I once had a computer running all the time to run POPFile and filter my Gmail messages through IMAP. At that time POPFile+IMAP was not very stable and POPFile would crash often. And also, it was a pain to have a computer running all the time at home only for this. Then, there was another problem. POPFile would run every two or five minutes, so when I opened Gmail I used to find not yet filtered mails in the inbox. If you make a webservice that does this right, I will consider using it. Now I'm using Opera Mail, which is very nice, but the training is local and, therefore, I don't have the same filters and training at home and at the office, which is rather painful, sometimes. I'm sure there is a succesfull business behind this.
        jgrahamc 17y ago
        Well, I probably wouldn't use POPFile itself for this anyway because I have a blindingly fast C version of the same classification techniques called polymail which I license to people. Would just have to graft on the IMAP part. Hmm. Evening project? Clearly, the not yet filtered bit is a nuisance, that's why you really want it to be built into your mail client.
pqs 17y ago
Yes, there is, the mail client integrated in Opera Mail does this: "Learn from messages added to or removed from filter: allow Opera Mail to train itself into recognizing which messages belong in the filter, and which do not. This can act as a substitute for adding rules, or in addition to the rules. It learns from the messages you remove or add." http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/mail/sort/ http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/mail/sort/ I love this feature. It is also possible to use POPFile with any client and IMAP server. http://getpopfile.org/ http://getpopfile.org/
jgrahamc 17y ago
Well, there was this thing I wrote like 10 years ago called POPFile (http://getpopfile.org/ http://getpopfile.org/) when I had the problems that he is talking about. I haven't looked back. POPFile grew from POP only to lots of other protocols and many, many people still use it.
- chime 17y ago
  POPFile is awesome. Definitely one of the most useful email apps I've ever used. Thanks for all your work behind it.
  - jgrahamc 17y ago
    You are most welcome and I'll pass on your praise to the people who keep POPFile alive and growing today.
- patio11 17y ago
  Wait, you're THAT jgrahamc?! Whoa, small world. I nearly invited you to speak in Japan about POPFile and OSS at the technology incubator that was my ex-ex-day job, but our budget fell through. As far as I know our not-quite-ready-for-primetime POPFile/Outlook integration is still protecting a few hundred desktops next to a rice field.
  - jgrahamc 17y ago
    Whoa. Are you talking about QuickPOPFile? I would have happily come to Japan and spoken, I've been there before and always loved the place.
    - patio11 17y ago
      QuickPOPFile was not quite us, but the general idea to make it useful for non-technical folks was similar. (We were going to aggregate filtering across an organization, on the assumption that most folks couldn't be bothered to train emails. Turns out this is easier to do if you are Google than if you want to run a parallel mail infrastructure alongside the one that actually delivers mail.)
joshuabaer 17y ago
We're doing this at OtherInbox.com with our Organizer solution. I saw another company doing this in the TC50 demo pit last year but I can't remember the name. Most of our Organizer logic starts with heuristic matches on the From address and other headers in the message, but we're also testing out Bayesian filtering on the message bodies to identify other traits and train the system. Joshua Baer | @joshuabaer

chime 17y ago

Why not get a secretary? If email is the lifeline to your work-life then it makes sense to pay someone $15/hr on a part-time basis to deal with the chaos. A capable assistant can very easily organize your email saving you the time to do what you do best. Maybe there is an opportunity here for a web-based solution to this problem. Of course he doesn't want to give someone access to his gmail account. So maybe there's a way to selectively allow someone access to your inbox folder with auditing/logging/organizing features. This way someone else can manage your inbox but not go around snooping for password reset emails.

jacquesm 17y ago
Email can be pretty personal, and in the end someone will have to answer it. He's not even getting that much mail, if you count it out he says that 'from the beginning of April to the first week of may' he went from a few hundred to an unmanageable thousand. That's only about 30 messages per day, if he simply kept up with it it would not be an issue. Once the mountain is high enough it can be very intimidating. Imagine not washing the dishes for a full month. edit: changed spam in to mail, the point still stands.
- chime 17y ago
  You have a point about the low volume at 30/day. I've had 100+ emails a day in the past for long periods so I understand how bad it can get once things pile up. President of our company gets 100+ emails a day and could surely use some help. I've met quite a few good administrative assistants and they are aware of how trustworthy and reliable they have to be. They can just glance over an email body and if it sounds really personal, put it into the "personal" bucket. They can also reply to emails that just need a "Thanks" and forward other emails to appropriate people as necessary. If they take notes, they can describe all their activities to the mailbox owner in a few minutes. I'm just saying as good as computers/apps have become, a second set of eyes and hands can still make a busy CEO's life easier.
- aquark 17y ago
  We don't know how many emails a day he was dealing with. Clearly, he wasn't ignoring email over this period, so many he was already keeping up with 30, 50, 100, 200 emails and this was just the excess.

jacquesm 17y ago

Looks like someone is in the need of better spam filters. Just for fun I disabled the spam filter on our mailserver for a few minutes a while ago, took me hours to clean up afterwards. The spam volumes are simply unbelievable, but with proper filtering it really isn't that much of a problem. I think I get about 20 to 30 spam messages per day nowadays that somehow make it past the filter. I do update the filter rules with every message that gets through though, usually on subject or body keywords.

mstevens 17y ago
It sounds like his problem is too many nonspam emails. Which presumably wouldn't be helped by spam filtering!
tuxychandru 17y ago
But he says they're all non-spam mails.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Ah yes, my bad! thanks! But that's only 30 emails per day!! Where do I sign for that?
  - chime 17y ago
    > Where do I sign for that? If you want fewer emails, you need to stop signing up willy-nilly.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      Nah, most of the email I get is because I've built up a fairly extensive net of personal contacts over the years and email (rather than say facebook or so) is my preferred way of staying in touch. The contacts are both business, private and 'mixed', and I really don't mind the volume, it's just that 30 sounds like a great number. I reply to emails usually very quickly (unless I'm sleeping), even if they are a bit more complicated because I know that if I let it slide the 'mountain' will start to look too high to me to. It's mostly a matter of discipline.

RyanMcGreal 17y ago

>But the more efficient I get with email, the more of it that comes in. Jevons Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

iamelgringo 17y ago

Please someone make email better! This is a huge problem. Gmail is okay, and it's the best web mail out there. Filters are really pretty useful, but as far as I'm concerned, Gmail's two great innovations were 1) it's approach to threaded conversations. IMHO it's "The Right Way" to do it and 2) archiving email as opposed to deleting it. But, it seems like they've really stopped innovating, and it really leaves a lot to be desired. Labs features are nice, but not really game changers. Gmail's contact management sucks. I have hundreds of contacts in my contacts list from running the Hackers and Founders meetups, and I try really hard to write notes and metadata about each contact after I meet them, but it's really hard to get at those notes from an individual email. Xobni really has the right idea with this. If I could easily change the display of emails to threaded conversations ala Gmail and easily get the archive feature, I'd make the switch over to Xobni + Outlook in a heart beat. I'm more than willing to pay $10 -20 a month to someone that can solve this problem for me....

lamby 17y ago
Have you looked at the newer generation of text-based clients? The main one thrown around is http://notmuchmail.org/ http://notmuchmail.org/
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
carbocation 17y ago
Thunderbird allows both threading and archival.

rabidgnat 17y ago

Keeping your email under control requires an unreasonable amount of discipline. I've managed to avoid 'defaulting' on my email so far, but at a decent overhead rate: Every hour or two, I wipe out my inbox completely and leave only items that absolutely require an action. Most mail is read once and interesting email gets archived by sender name. I have lots of filters set up for people who usually send me uninteresting mail. Everything else is deleted. I've almost lost control a few times - mostly because of vacations- and I'm certain that I'll hit a tipping point where my time doesn't scale to my inbox size. I couldn't handle my boss' email load, for instance... Are there any good techniques that scale for dealing with email?

AlisdairO 17y ago
Some email, you absolutely need to respond to immediately, and fair enough. For anything that isn't totally urgent, try replying a day or two later. You can stick a reply in a draft folder and fill it out later. This slows down the flow of new email: it cuts out the sorts of mail where you're going back and forth several times in the same day.