4 ms·

The problem for me is that the data contained in an email is unstructured. You have to read through the body of an email to get the important info, like a tra

by byoung2 13y ago

The problem for me is that the data contained in an email is unstructured. You have to read through the body of an email to get the important info, like a tracking number or address to a friend's party. Granted Gmail helps with the quick links, but that's only one provider. And search is terrible. There is still no way that I've found to say, show all image attachments from a certain person or show all tracking numbers I've received in the last 30 days without a bunch of clunky searches. And there should be a way to add tags to an email from the sender's side that appear on the recipient's side, like "news, article, startup" when someone sends me a techcrunch link. It would be great to search these by tag. Plus, emails should come with an expiration date option. If my bank sends a daily balance alert, they should be able to send an expiration header of 24 hours so that they don't stack up. In my client I could choose to honor the expiration header and delete or archive, or ignore it altogether. The same would go for event invitations whose dates pass, etc.

chany2 13y ago
Email is not broken. The usage of email is however mishandled. - Overload of messages - Email Search / Discovery - Finding important content - Unnecessary CCs - Major contents still live in emails - Go-to place for everything; filtering important vs non-important @byoung2, I think you reference a critical problem with email as I listed above. Sorting emails by "Actionable Categorization" by both sender and recipient. Getting hold of the most important information asap without re-reading the content. Currently, I am hacking with an idea on Hashtags for Important Email. - Sender can write hashtag inside contents of the emails to group them appropriately for the recipient. - Multiple users using hashtag help group important content together; leading to a Sharepoint for Email. - Long email threads would be summarize to get the most relevant information possible. Love to get your feedback @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6948659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6948659
- byoung2 13y ago
  Sounds interesting...I'll take a look at the other thread. I like the idea of hashtags for flexible categorization, but I think we need to go further, e.g. now I can see all #startup #article emails my coworker sent me, or all #vacation #photo emails from my college roommate who travels for a living, but do I really have to click into each email to get the link to each article or image attachment? Can't there be something that lets me choose hashtags:#vacation #photo,sender:John Doe and returns a CoverFlow type gallery of all the images, with the text of the emails as captions? Or hashtags:#startup #article to get a Flipboard type personalized magazine made up of the formatted text of all of the articles found.
  - chany2 13y ago
    I put your idea into consideration. See Image#3 at http://garyyauchan.com/sharepoint-for-emails/ http://garyyauchan.com/sharepoint-for-emails/ . I definitely see the need only if this new Important-Email-Inbox on my app becomes very abundant with content. Then the need to filter becomes important. There are two things I want to stay away from at that moment. 1) Calling this app I am developing as a "New Inbox", I think it would give the idea there is another source for their incoming mails. The idea is you hashtag ONLY IMPORTANT EMAILS to set yourself as a reminder, etc... 2) I would also like to avoid the Search / Filtering feature - which leads back down to the road of Gmail's Search. One of the cases for developing this app is because Search is not intelligent enough when there is a massive volume of emails. Also I am going to re-think the idea of Flipboard as the new UI medium to become the differentiator to other email apps. Great feedback btw!
_delirium 13y ago
> Granted Gmail helps with the quick links, but that's only one provider. An open-source project to heuristically extract structured information from emails that's useful to present at a glance could be interesting and useful.

by byoung2 13y ago

chany2 13y ago

Email is not broken. The usage of email is however mishandled. - Overload of messages - Email Search / Discovery - Finding important content - Unnecessary CCs - Major contents still live in emails - Go-to place for everything; filtering important vs non-important @byoung2, I think you reference a critical problem with email as I listed above. Sorting emails by "Actionable Categorization" by both sender and recipient. Getting hold of the most important information asap without re-reading the content. Currently, I am hacking with an idea on Hashtags for Important Email. - Sender can write hashtag inside contents of the emails to group them appropriately for the recipient. - Multiple users using hashtag help group important content together; leading to a Sharepoint for Email. - Long email threads would be summarize to get the most relevant information possible. Love to get your feedback @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6948659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6948659

byoung2 13y ago
Sounds interesting...I'll take a look at the other thread. I like the idea of hashtags for flexible categorization, but I think we need to go further, e.g. now I can see all #startup #article emails my coworker sent me, or all #vacation #photo emails from my college roommate who travels for a living, but do I really have to click into each email to get the link to each article or image attachment? Can't there be something that lets me choose hashtags:#vacation #photo,sender:John Doe and returns a CoverFlow type gallery of all the images, with the text of the emails as captions? Or hashtags:#startup #article to get a Flipboard type personalized magazine made up of the formatted text of all of the articles found.
- chany2 13y ago
  I put your idea into consideration. See Image#3 at http://garyyauchan.com/sharepoint-for-emails/ http://garyyauchan.com/sharepoint-for-emails/ . I definitely see the need only if this new Important-Email-Inbox on my app becomes very abundant with content. Then the need to filter becomes important. There are two things I want to stay away from at that moment. 1) Calling this app I am developing as a "New Inbox", I think it would give the idea there is another source for their incoming mails. The idea is you hashtag ONLY IMPORTANT EMAILS to set yourself as a reminder, etc... 2) I would also like to avoid the Search / Filtering feature - which leads back down to the road of Gmail's Search. One of the cases for developing this app is because Search is not intelligent enough when there is a massive volume of emails. Also I am going to re-think the idea of Flipboard as the new UI medium to become the differentiator to other email apps. Great feedback btw!

_delirium 13y ago

> Granted Gmail helps with the quick links, but that's only one provider. An open-source project to heuristically extract structured information from emails that's useful to present at a glance could be interesting and useful.