DISQUS

Deva Hazarika · 1 year ago

Steven, excellent post. You're preaching to the choir. I've written my broad thoughts on the topic here: http://www.emaildashboard.com/2008/01/my-email-... . One point I wanted to clarify is that at ClearContext we agree with you that while email provides a lot of great opportunities for social networking related stuff, the things that are really broken are core information management, categorization, and processing issues. Everything we do is focused around utilizing the context available within the email messages itself to provide users with ways to effectively process the incoming information at a higher level than simply a message by message individual basis.

StevenHodson · 1 year ago

The additional problem is that not everyone uses Windows, Outlook or Apple, Apple Mail or even Gmail.

Take myself I stopped using Outlook because it made absolutely no sense since I would use only a portion of what it offers - the rest would be nothing more than bloat. That doesn't mean though that I switched to a web based solution like Gmail - that won't happen - instead I use an excellent email client called InScribe. so any solution that ClearContext or any of the other entrants in the field would be of no use to me.

I don't pretend to know the solution to this problem but I think it is something that is beyond anything that a plugin will be able to fix - the marketplace for email clients is just too big to be able to cover all the bases.

Computer Guru · 1 year ago

Off Topic: Your blog is hard to read. Gray on white == illegible. Please add some contrast!

StevenHodson · 1 year ago

Consider it done and thanks for pointing this out to me.

Gabor Cselle · 1 year ago

Steven, these are good thoughts. Many have suggested various uses for clustering email. Sounds great in theory, but I actually did quite research about exactly this topic, and the results are acceptable, but not sensational:

http://www.gaborcselle.com/msthesis/

Building ML/AI-based systems to do these things is hard to do really well.

I think that so many of the fundamental things about the way you access your email are broken. For example, the way you view your email - a time-sorted list of incoming messages - hasn't changed in the last 20 years.

However, the way you think about email is not as a time-sorted list, but as an amalgamation of people, relationships, files, and conversations. At Xobni, we're fixing these things first, before moving on to fancier things. Watch out for more :-)

Gabor Cselle

StevenHodson · 1 year ago

I agree with you that the mechanisms by which we access things like our email is broken but as I said to Deva above given the size of the email marketplace a simple solution of a plugin to fix the problem isn't going to work.

Even as a non Outlook user though I do keep my eye on what both companies are doing if only from a general interest POV.

olie · 1 year ago

"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. "

I don't know where you drink but, around here, the strippers take FAR too long to shed their g-strings.

StevenHodson · 1 year ago

ROFL ...