February 10, 2009
On the surface email seems like a mature application, without any obvious ways to make it better.
At least that’s what everybody thought until Gmail came along, with a bunch of excellent innovations: threaded conversations, automated archiving and labels rather than a folder structure, etc, etc.
So, what would you do to improve email even further?
Here are two simple ideas that would make email much better for me:
1. Hide until
This would simply allow me to “hide” a selected message until some date in the future. Then on that date the message would re-appear in my inbox.
I try and keep my inbox empty. In practice, that means at any given time my inbox contains a handful of messages which need a response. It would be nicer, where I’m waiting on somebody else, or need to respond, but not straight away, to be able to get that message out of the list temporarily.
This seems like it would be pretty easy to implement.
2. Auto-scan for forgotten attachments
This would scan each message when I click “send” and if the body of the message includes the words “see attached” or something similar and there is nothing attached, it would stop and confirm that I didn’t forget to actually attach the document.
If I had a dollar for each time I had to follow-up with a “doh - actually attached this time” message :
Likewise this doesn’t seem that hard (famous last words, those!)
What do you think?
Would those be useful to you too?
Perhaps they already exist?
What other little ideas do you have for improving email and some of the other tools you use everyday?