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One thing I would really love in an email client is a strong separation between reading and writing email. During productive hours when I'm sitting at my desk,
by arohner 14y ago
One thing I would really love in an email client is a strong separation between reading and writing email. During productive hours when I'm sitting at my desk, I would really like to be able to 1) open GMail, 2) read old email 3) Write new email.
I absolutely do not want the ability to read new email during that time. In fact, I would really like to set up GMail so email only arrives on a fixed schedule, say 2-4 times a day.
- its_so_on 14y agojust have your secretary print your email twice a day (1). you can read it at your leisure (2), and dictate your responses whenever you want. (3)
- hnriot 14y agowhat is this, 1950? Sounds like something from Mad Men.
- astrodust 14y agoAutomator, a printer and Siri might be pretty close.
- swampthing 14y agoi think it's a reference to knuth's advice on the matter
- nmcfarl 14y agoIt sounds like something 1950 got right. At least to me.
- hef19898 14y agoBetter write your comments on the print out and have it faxed back by your secretary.
- hnriot 14y agoI would really like to set up GMail so email only arrives on a fixed schedule, say 2-4 times a day why not do it then? it's pretty simple to do? I think the real reason is that you like the idea of doing that, but not the reality. Cultural atavism might sound like a good idea, but the reality is the positive benefits of email and smartphones way outweighs the negatives.
- potatolicious 14y agoI wouldn't be so certain of that. On a vacation a few months ago I turned off automatic email fetching on my phone to try and eke out a few more hours of battery, and just kind of left it there to see what would happen. On an average day I hit the "get my email" button twice. Once when I wake up in the morning to see if there's anything pressing, and once on my way home from work as I'm walking towards the train. I have absolutely not missed the disruption that having a constantly-up-to-date email client in your pocket creates. I have also yet to miss a single email due to this - people have better sense than that. If they need a quick response they know to call me or to text. From this I've started pruning the apps and services that can interrupt me pretty hard. At this point I'm down to my calendar, my SMS client, FB direct messages, and the NYTimes (they seem to be pretty responsible, but they are on a short leash). It's worked out. I'm very much enjoying this pull lifestyle, instead of push.
- arohner 14y agoHow do I set that up with GMail? It's trivial on a desktop client, or one where I own the server.
- hollerith 14y agoGMail can be configured to retrieve mail from another mailbox. That is, it can function as a POP3 client. That's the route I would investigate first.
- ljoshua 14y agoThis is definitely a great idea, I've been thinking of different ways to accomplish it myself. The research backs this up too as a very reasonable solution, allowing workers to still be productive in replying, while only checking new email at certain intervals. In fact, you've even come across the magic number for email checking frequency. Checking it 4 times a day provides the best trade-off between reply speed and productivity gain, as seen in research by Gupta et. al.[1] [1] Gupta, A., Sharda, R., & Greve, R. a. (2010). You’ve got email! Does it really matter to process emails now or later? Information Systems Frontiers
- monkeypizza 14y agoYeah, it's weird that this feature doesn't exist. It would be even better on smartphones; constantly having the new mail icon pop up on is so distracting that I have turned off automatic email checking on my phone, and just check manually every couple hours when not near a computer. This was after being surprised not to be able to find an option to control gmail's polling interval.
- mike-cardwell 14y agoI use K-9 Mail on my Android phone. It lets me set up per folder poll intervals and per folder push settings. Eg, I can have email from one folder pushed to my phone on delivery (using IMAP IDLE), another folder to be polled once every two hours, another daily, and the rest manually. Your "smartphone" doesn't sound very smart. [Edit] I use sieve filters on the server side to route email into various folders on delivery. [Edit2] I just double checked, and the "per folder settings" are not quite as granular as I thought. You can only set up one poll interval and add that to a selection of folders, and then set other folders to push or nothing. You can't have multiple poll intervals. Eg, Could set two folders to push, three folders to poll hourly, and the rest to manual only polls.
- Dylan16807 14y agoIt's easy to pull mail into a desktop client on a schedule. Why haven't you taken a few minutes to set one up?
- arohner 14y agoBecause I'm not using a desktop client.
- jvdh 14y agoIt does give you exactly what you want: easy access to old email, a simple way of writing new email, and a scheduled time for getting new mail.
- philwelch 14y agoIt solves your problem. You'd be giving up the Gmail web client, but the Gmail web client has turned to crap lately and other mail clients have grown an "archive" button and a usable search feature, so there's no compelling reason not to switch.
- tt 14y agoSounds good, but it will introduce new problems: 1) someone called and said "I sent you that urgent email; didn't you get it?!?" and you had forgotten about the rules you set up for email receipt. 2) Services that send email notifications now have to add another reminder so people may have to check their email rules in addition to the Spam folder in case mail is "lost" there.
- philwelch 14y agoSo just have a manual "get mail" button that you can mash like every other mail client ever. If someone sends me an urgent email, and it's genuinely urgent, they'll follow it up with a phone call or a text or an IM, and then I can mash the "get mail" button.
- btilly 14y agoThe fact that someone else thinks an email is urgent does not mean that I'll think it is. And if it really is urgent, they can call me. Unless you're the kind of person who both sends an email and then immediately calls me about it. If you're that kind of person you quickly will be informed of how much I dislike that. If you persist, I'll take advantage of my freedom as a contractor to choose my own projects, and you'll soon not be a person that has any reason to interact with me.
- greyman 14y agoBut they might want to send you some attachments or URLs, while not knowing other techniques to pass them to you.
- Tyrannosaurs 14y agoIf it's urgent you should still call first to confirm that the person is available and able to deal with what you need them to deal with and that what you're sending them is what they need. Anything else risks wasting a bunch of people's time going back and forth which if it's genuinely urgent (it usually isn't) everyone should want to avoid.
- prostoalex 14y agoGo into offline mode. Gmail will sync back up when you're online.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- danmaz74 14y agoI think you could set up a filter to directly archive all new email, and mark it with a specific tag. Then, when you want to check your new email, search for that tag, and un-archive the messages you actually want in your inbox.
- Maascamp 14y agoI'm actually working on a product right now that provides that precise functionality (and more!) for Gmail. It also lets you schedule when your email arrives for specific groups or single contacts. It's https://lightermail.com https://lightermail.com and we'll be opening up the beta in a week or so. Hope it helps
- NeilRShah 14y agoSigned up! Will it have an "offline" mode for Gmail? This is something I, too, have been wanting for a long while...
- stupandaus 14y agoThis exists for offline Gmail: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejidjjhkpiempkbhmpbfngldlkglhimk https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejidjjhkpiempkbhmp...
- senko 14y agoJust to comment on your landing page: Your comment here told me much more about what this is about than the copy there. Unless you're counting on the incoming links' context to inform people what it's about (if you do, fair enough), I'd suggest a bit more info to the potential users.
- AhtiK 14y agoTo see e-mail only sent before today feel free to use this bookmarklet: javascript:(function(){var d=new Date(Date.parse(new Date())-86400000);var t="https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/"+"before%"+"3A"+d.getFullYear()+"%"+"2F"+(d.getMonth()+1)+"%"+"2F"+d.getDate()+"+in%"+"3Ainbox";window.location.href=t;})() This searches gmail for "before:2012/08/29 in:inbox" where date depends on your current date. I would love to use a search like before:2012/08/29 OR circle:"vip" [1] unfortunately doesn't seem to work. circle:"vip" alone works great but fails with "OR". [1] GMail Search parmaters http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=7190 http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...
- vog 14y agoI'm achieving exactly this with my local email client. Okay, it's not a fancy web application, but exactly that's making it so valuable for me. When I open my email client, it shows all "old" mail to me, and allows me to write new emails. It only fetches new emails when I explicitly tell it to do that. I'm using Mutt, but I think this should work with any other email client such as Thunderbird. All you have to do is disabling the auto-fetching of new emails. And if you still feel the urge to hit the "Get Mail" button, then just configure it away from the toolbar. tl;dr: It's all there - you just need a tiny configuration change in your email client.
- pc86 14y agoPerfect example of something that's been available for ages but people somehow think they need a shiny web app (SaaS with a monthly subscription, of course) to do.
- gcr 14y agoWhy not use a traditional mail client that polls for mail when you tell it to? If you're a commandline junkie, Sup and Notmuch both come pretty close to a gmail-style "search everything / tags everywhere" philosophy.