Three former Google employees from Sydney, Australia have been working on a solution called Fluent for the inbox overload many people are facing these days.
Key features include:
- New service displays email as a “stream” like Facebook
- Shows attachments like photos as a slide show
-Multiple account support for a single login
- Allows instant searching through emails as you type
The team consists of Cameron Adams, Dhanji Prasanna and Jochen Bekmann. After Google halted development on Google Wave, Adams and Prasanna quit (with Bekmann following later) to work on Fluent.
One of the key goals of the new email handling platform is to have people take action on messages received right away, instead of reading into all the details. This should make working with email about 20% more efficient.
Recently Google’s CEO Larry Page shared some milestones during the company’s 2011 earnings conference call. One of the most interesting numbers shared was that the Gmail webservice now has 350 million users. This is a big jump from the 260 million people that were using Gmail back in October 2011, just 3 months ago.
The most recent number of Hotmail users is from March 2010 which sits at 369 million users, expectations are that that number has grown since then, but not by much.
In a report by BBC News, Volkswagen notes that all Blackberry work email will be turned off outside office hours. This move has been executed by Volkswagen Germany earlier this year, following complaints about the division between work life and private life fading.
Quoting the report:
Under the arrangement servers stop routing emails 30 minutes after the end of employees’ shifts, and then start again 30 minutes before they return to work.
The staff can still use their devices to make calls and the rule does not apply to senior management.
“We wanted to take a preventative approach to tackling the issue,” said Gunnar Killian, VW’s works council spokesman.
I’m actually interested why the rule would not apply to senior management of VW: do they receive so little work email it’s not a problem as such? Are they not a member of the trade union? Or are they ‘always on’ anyway and have no separation between work life and private life?
Is your company actively managing the email load for you to give you ample time to enjoy your private life? If you don’t have a Blackberry or other company smartphone, are you obliged by job function / task description to handle email outside office hours? Let us know in the comments.
Some people declare email bankruptcy in their working and/or private communications. In their time, something went wrong and their inbox is swamped with a bajillion emails – an amount no filter, SmartScreen or Priority Inbox can handle. They delete everything and start over, or even delete their email account completely – hence email bankruptcy.
Others consider email something of the past, like this entertaining post on TechCrunch called Remembering Email. The post notes that social is the answer: we should pursue all our communications through the social platform channels. Instead of having one or two email addresses, use several social networks to communicate. Yaay! I say a bad user blames his tools.
Mastering the ways of email can be daunting when you send and receive a lot, but you can learn in time.
A quote from that TechCrunch post:
Our kids already understand that email is fading.
No they don’t – they just don’t use it as much as the 20+ demographic group because they don’t have (serious) jobs yet. As soon as they get a job, they will start using email. In some cases, heavily even.
Let’s get one thing straight: you own your inbox. You and you alone are responsible for your email address(es): both the receiving and sending of email. If you receive a lot of email and the important emails get drowned out by all the non-important ones, kill off the stream of non-important email. As much as I love email marketing, too much simply is too much. Cut down on any type of notification emails which are unnecessary. A more extensive list of tips to cut down on inbox load can be found in this post about crowded inboxes.
The point of this post is that there really is a solution, and you alone can apply it. Be happy with your inbox again. Make the “Ding! You’ve got mail!” sound a happy sound again like 10 years ago:
Go forth and own your inbox – never let go!
(title of this post is based on an old internet meme – aybabtu - all your base are belong to us.)
Currently Hotmail is in the process of rolling out a new release (would this be Wave 6?), the latest version of its webmail service which includes separate filters called categories, like the Newsletter category. This latest version was announced early October by the Windows Live team. Here are some screenshots of the changes:
When selecting the Newsletters option on the bar, only newsletters that fit te category will be shown: it will act as a filter on the inbox – it will not be a separate box or folder as some have believed it would be.
Here’s how the categories work:
We use the same SmartScreen™ technology that helps us fight spam – a machine learning engine that gets better over time. Right out of the gate, we’re 95% accurate with the mail we categorize as newsletters, and this will only get better as you help us build the feature by categorizing or un-categorizing your own mail. In fact, every time you categorize an email as a newsletter, you help make our filtering better for yourself and every other customer.
The Schedule cleanup option popup looks like this (this has been there for some time now):
This can help in keeping your inbox tidy, especially if you receive a lot of emails in your Hotmail inbox. Daily deals like Groupon emails anyone? Together with the recently introduced flags, you can win back your inbox by tidying up its contents and using flags on messages that really matter.
Videos explaining the new functionality:
Schedule Cleanup:
Flags done right:
Custom categories:
Hotmail has started to roll out all the new features of the new release to the public last Friday, but it will be some time before all its 400+ million users can enjoy the new functionality.
Hotmail has re-introduced an old feature: flags to keep messages on top (click for larger):
The content of the email from the Hotmail Team reads:
As the Hotmail flags email notes, you can choose to show other actions in the Options page. The flags feature can help in managing inboxes with high daily or weekly volume to keep the messages that deserve more attention on top of your inbox. This new/old feature seems a lot like Gmail’s Priority Inbox, launched in August last year.
If you receive a newsletter, and actually feel like you don’t want it (anymore), use the unsubscribe option! These days it happens a lot that people just click spam or junk in their email clients, even when it is not the case. Hotmail has been looking at the spam complaints received through their interface feedback, and the following has been the result:
“ In fact, 75% of email identified as spam by our customers actually turns out to be unwanted graymail that they receive as a result of having signed up on a legitimate website.”
This is a quote from a post which I discussed here earlier: it’s on the Windows Live Team blog and called ‘Hotmail declares war on graymail‘. Graymail? It should not exist because it will affect legitimate businesses in the long run. Hotmail however has started this campaign.
However, using the junk/spam button if you don’t want something anymore when it is actually something that you have opted-in for yourself is wrong. Why? Because you can impact a sender’s legitimate reputation and others receiving email from them, that’s why.
Chris Pirillo explains how and what in this video:
Remember, if you didn’t sign up for any newsletter or advertising and you are receiving it, feel free to hit the spam button. But never forget what you subscribe for! Quite some organizations out there are using email marketing in a serious way and do not want to spam and alienate you. They will honor the unsubscribe, so you should honor the unsubscribe button.
Also, other people that really do want to receive the email from those companies you’re impacting with your junk button usage might have those email end up directly in their junk folder instead of their inbox. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you? Honest companies would go out of business, while all you (and I) really want to do is take out the businesses that are spamming.
To everyone working at an ESP: please spread the word. It will help your business and that of your clients to make the usage of the junk button fair, and let people honor the unsubscribe button.
IBM has published a research report titled “Triage and capture: rethinking mobile email“. I’ve conducted an email interview with the lead researcher of the team, dr. Jeff Pierce about the findings of the project and the response by the test users.
The Q&A:
Remy:
How was the reception of the new mobile email client with the triage options? Did they use it ‘naturally’ or need some practice?
Jeff:
I’d say it was good, with a caveat. The mobile email client we built was a research prototype, which largely means that we built it to explore a point in the design space rather than intended that it be a production quality application. Just as a single example of what that means, we never built a mechanism to reply to email messages, since that wasn’t what we were focusing on learning (although I’ll note that none of the folks using the prototype ever asked for the ability to reply; take from that what you will .
We did deploy the email application internally to a set of users to study the triage and capture aspects. Overall users liked both the ability to more easily identify what was new and important (and we’ve done more research in the vein of helping users identify “highlights” within their email) and the ability to capture tasks around messages. However, one issue we ran into was that the desktop email client was just a regular email client with a plugin to show captured tasks; users wanted better integration than that on the desktop side. So I think to be really successfully we would need to rebuild the desktop email client to better leverage email handling the user performed on the mobile client. But that was beyond the scope of the research project.
Instead of the inbox, the mail triage screen is shown.
Remy:
Will the mobile email client be proposed as an app in the App store / Market of resp. Apple iOS and Android, or will it be a clients-only app?
Jeff:
Right now it’s neither; it’s an internal research prototype. Down the road it’s possible that we’d look to deploy it externally, but it’s also possible that the ideas might be picked up by an existing IBM product. Or it might just remain a lab curiosity we built to learn some lessons around mobile email handling. =)
Remy:
Has there already been shown interest for the mobile email client from IBM clients yet, or not?
Jeff:
We have shown it to clients (we actually demoed it at Lotusphere 2010 in the Innovation Lab), and folks have shown interest. But we haven’t yet made it available for clients to try.
Untriaged view of the inbox, with circles on the left indicating how many people were involved in the email conversation, including CC.
Remy:
What type of email user and daily volume would benefit most of this triage-style of email handling? Someone on a project group, a support group or different? On daily volume: 5 would be low, 20 would be medium and 50+ would be high volume.
Jeff:
I’d say medium volumes and up. If you’re only getting 5 messages a day, you don’t need help keeping track of tasks you need to handle in your email. But as soon as you have 15-20 messages or more in the morning, it starts to become useful to have help determining what’s new, what you’ve already decided how to handle, and what tasks you have associated with those messages. I’d argue that the more email you have the more helpful supporting triaging messages and capturing intended tasks becomes, because it gets progressively harder to keep track of what you have and haven’t handled as you get more and more messages.
Remy:
When using triage as email management, will other email users be trained to write better subject lines, so the person triaging can better judge the email by its subject line? I can imagine (and have experienced) subject lines like “Question” or “Help with this please” – will those be a thing of the past?
Jeff:
Hmmm, possibly. Although we’ve done some separate studies of how much information preview to show for email messages, and people are surprisingly good at figuring out what a message is about just from the sender, subject, and a couple of lines of the body.
Tasks overview in the mobile email client.
Remy:
Has the new mobile email client with the triage options made email volume by the users involved drop, grow or stay the same?
Jeff:
Giving folks new or different mechanisms to handle messages doesn’t really make the volume go up or down, although I could spin an argument where keeping track of the work associated with your tasks might result in fewer follow-up messages from your colleagues asking when you’re going to respond to their messages or accomplish some task they set for you. But we didn’t see any changes in incoming email volume that were attributable to our prototype client from those users trying it out.
A video showing the way email triage works (c) IBM Research.
I’d like to thank dr. Jeff Pierce for his time in answering these questions and giving these insights into the research study!
Return Path has done a research study which they present in a document called “Where Are We Viewing Email Now?” The document involves email usage stats on desktop, mobile and webmail throughout the period of April 2011 up to and including September 2011. Next to client and platform usage, industry details on usage are involved as well.
A small summary of the findings:
- Usage shares: webmail 44%, desktop 33%, mobile 23%. Mobile is up by 34% in the measured period, webmail and desktop down (11% and 9,5% respectively).
- Mobile and webmail usage was highest in the weekend (especially Sunday), desktop high point was Monday.
- iPad usage is exploding: a 73% increase over the measured period.
- On the desktop email space, Outlook remains on top with nearly two-third of the market, Apple Mail has nearly one-third. Lotus Notes (smallest usage base) is at 0.34%.
The study was based on over 400 million data points from more than 200 different Return Path clients. You can find the document here for download at Return Path.
In a blog post on their website the MailRank team notes that they have been hired by Facebook effective this December. Remember Project Titan? Eventually it was launched as the new Facebook Messages in November last year. In the meantime things have been awfully quiet around the service – not to mention the very small amount of people diggin a @facebook.com email address.
MailRank is a small team dedicated to getting your email priorities right without technical fuzz, helping email users keeping a lid on their email volume. In the blog post, MailRank is not getting into details what they exactly will be working on, but with their email prioritizing experience chances are big that they will give the Facebook Messages service a push in the right direction.
Three former Google employees from Sydney, Australia have been working on a solution called Fluent for the inbox overload many people are facing these days.
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