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I'm drowning in email. It's hard to tell which email is important, and it's hard to tell which important emails haven't been dealt with. Gmail's priority inbox

I'm drowning in email. It's hard to tell which email is important, and it's hard to tell which important emails haven't been dealt with. Gmail's priority inbox thing is useless for me. If you solved this problem, actually solved it, I'd pay whatever you asked. $25, $50, $100/month? A bargain.

brudgers 14y ago
My gut tells me that smart email isn't a web-based solution - it's a local one. What matters is knowing about how you work, and the information to do that isn't on the web, it's on your hard drive. Web processes cannot afford to work on optimizing results for you in the background, they are focused on getting your answer quick and then moving on to the next customer. On the other hand, right now I've probably got 98% idle CPU on the 8 cores of this machine which could be figuring out when and how to deal with my email by looking at the terabytes of local data I've collected over the past few years. It's a shrink wrapped product, not a service. Given how well Google and Facebook can serve individually targeted ads over the web based on a handful of CPU cycles, odds are that a dedicated local service could handle email if utilizing idle CPU cycles.
rkwz 14y ago
Just curious, what kind of emails do you get? > It's hard to tell which email is important, and it's hard to tell which important emails haven't been dealt with. Does it mean that you get way more unimportant emails than important ones? Can't you just filter them away to tags/trash?
- tstegart 14y ago
  Yeah, I second this. I don't get many emails because I've taken myself off the all lists. Can't the OP do the same? No twitter notifications, no FB notifications, remove yourself from all RSS feeds that you never look at, all mailing lists. Maybe its not email's problem but a problem with your organization abilities.
- geoffschmidt 14y ago
  I guess the problem is that there are a lot of things that are "somewhat" important, and I can't do them all, so I have to triage even between the "important" items. A friend of a friend is having a housewarming party? Cool, I normally want to know, and maybe put it on my calendar. But when I get behind on my mail I don't even want to see that stuff on my screen. And a lot of the unimportant stuff I want to at least glance at, if I have a spare minute.

brudgers 14y ago

My gut tells me that smart email isn't a web-based solution - it's a local one. What matters is knowing about how you work, and the information to do that isn't on the web, it's on your hard drive. Web processes cannot afford to work on optimizing results for you in the background, they are focused on getting your answer quick and then moving on to the next customer. On the other hand, right now I've probably got 98% idle CPU on the 8 cores of this machine which could be figuring out when and how to deal with my email by looking at the terabytes of local data I've collected over the past few years. It's a shrink wrapped product, not a service. Given how well Google and Facebook can serve individually targeted ads over the web based on a handful of CPU cycles, odds are that a dedicated local service could handle email if utilizing idle CPU cycles.

rkwz 14y ago

Just curious, what kind of emails do you get? > It's hard to tell which email is important, and it's hard to tell which important emails haven't been dealt with. Does it mean that you get way more unimportant emails than important ones? Can't you just filter them away to tags/trash?

tstegart 14y ago
Yeah, I second this. I don't get many emails because I've taken myself off the all lists. Can't the OP do the same? No twitter notifications, no FB notifications, remove yourself from all RSS feeds that you never look at, all mailing lists. Maybe its not email's problem but a problem with your organization abilities.
geoffschmidt 14y ago
I guess the problem is that there are a lot of things that are "somewhat" important, and I can't do them all, so I have to triage even between the "important" items. A friend of a friend is having a housewarming party? Cool, I normally want to know, and maybe put it on my calendar. But when I get behind on my mail I don't even want to see that stuff on my screen. And a lot of the unimportant stuff I want to at least glance at, if I have a spare minute.