Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

When work keeps you busy all April it is nice to recieve small nuggest of wisdom along with stock tips.

In one short subject line it captures an important point that is often missing from the public discourse when it comes to free speech online. Thank you, Sam Lynn (but you can close your open relay now).

Somehow I don't think I got a very good deal. I paid $15 and got 0,000,000 eyeballs.

Lots of people have been talking about e-mail lately. A helping factor has probably been Google's new webmail service where you get so much storage space that you never have to delete anything. It brings me great joy that I'll be able to save all my spam for years to come.

Yesterday Jonas was talking about digital signatures and spam. Among other things he mentions using whitelists for e-mail. It's not the first time I've heard whitelistbeing mentioned. With a whitelist you would only be allowing e-mail from a preapproved number of people on this list instead of adding new spammers to your blacklist every day.

Of course this gives you some problems when people you don't know would like to get in touch with you. Friend-of-a-Friend is supposed to help with this (you would be able to allow e-mail from friends-of-friends), but that's hardly a real solution either.

What I would like for starters (in the end I want both what I propose here and digital signatures like Jonas) is something a lot more simple. Actually it's so simple that I'm surprised I haven't seen it in any e-mail client yet. I want to merge my social network software with my e-mail.

Every morning I turn on my computer to check e-mail. Usually I have more than one incoming e-mail in the morning because Americans don't run on Central European Time. In my inbox I can sort my messages on:

• The sender's name
• The subject of the e-mail
• The recieved date and time
• The total size of the e-mail (including attachments)

All of these are useless to me. I have to sort by date in my inbox because that's where I keep messages I have to reply to or use during the week. If I didn't sort by date I wouldn't be able to see the new e-mails recieved without looking through all e-mails in the inbox. Sender's name and subjects in e-mails are somewhat arbitrary and it doesn't make sense to sort by them. Size is also useless unless you think that longer letters are always more important than shorter.

My newly recieved e-mails should be sorted by relevance. By person.

There is already address books built into all e-mail clients, but I've not seen any doing anything more than linking a name to an e-mail address (and website address and phone number etc.). Opera's M2 lets you find all e-mails to and from a person easily, but that's it.

I would like my social networking software to interact directly with my e-mail inbox. My social network can be used to do far more than simply providing a whitelist. In my ideal world my e-mail inbox would function like this:

First I would see e-mails from my family and girlfriend. These are without a doubt the e-mails I would like to read first. Below I would have e-mails from friends, then co-workers, then colleagues (colleagues in an XFN sense). Last I would see e-mails from people I don't have any relations with.

This could of course be made more complex with friends who are also colleagues to be rated higher than friends who are not colleagues.

Of course only my incoming e-mail would work like this. For folders it doesn't make sense because when I open a folder I'm looking for one or more specific e-mails. Incoming mail is different. I will always be reading all of that.

This would work because my e-mail client would know what kind of relations I have with each person in my address book. There are numerous advantages to this in addition to dealing with incoming e-mail better. It would for example make it a lot easier to filter e-mails (eg. send all mail from co-workers to the “Work” folder). Or the e-mail client could have different profiles to activate (play a sound when I get e-mails from co-workers but don't disturb me with e-mail notifications from friends and family while I'm at work.)

E-mail has been around for what? 30 years? Why haven't anyone tried to implement something like this? It would be trivial to add to any e-mail client and it would make sorting through incoming e-mail much more pleasant giving you e-mail from the most important people first. Spam would of course always be at the bottom of the list when I recieve e-mail (since I never have a relation to spammers).

A feature like this isn't the all encompassing answer to e-mail sorting, but it would be a big step of the way. I like it a lot better than having a whitelist where often life has been made miserable for senders not on the recipients whitelist. I once got an e-mail from a person who wanted my help on a programming issue. When I replied I immediately got an answer from an e-mail robot saying that I was not on the recipient's whitelist and would I please verify that I'm a real person by replying and sending some code along.

The guy never got help on his programming issue.

Dave Shea wrote about how badly he manages his e-mail. I have had the same problems sa Dave with my e-mail. Not because I get large amounts of e-mail but because I'm lazy. What caught my eye is not how Dave answers his e-mail, but what he writes about making himself available for contact:

Making yourself available for discussion is not a bad thing, it just means that an understanding needs to be reached between you and those wishing to get in touch. It's a two-way road; you need to agree to be as responsive as possible, they need to agree to be selective as possible.

It reminded me of an idea I had some number of weeks ago. Dave is talking about e-mail as something that always needs to be replied to. In my world I don't expect, or even want, a reply to every e-mail I send out.

This is analogous to regular letters. Every letter don't warrant a reply either. Only with regular letters it's often much easier to spot the letter that doesn't need a reply (replying to your bank statement? Not happening). When someone has taken the time to write a personal letter on real paper with real stamps you send a reply. With e-mails it's much easier to fire off a personal letter.

That's why I lack a feature in my e-mail client. I want to send personal e-mails to a handful of people who runs websites that I read on a daily basis. But I don't have any intention of engaging in a discussion or even a conversation. I just want to write “Thanks for the great site you have. No reply necessary.” or “You wrote on topix X yesterday. You can find more on the same topic at site Y. No reply necessary.” The only problem is I feel a bit silly writing “No reply necessary.”

What I would like is a checkbox in my e-mail client where I could flag the e-mail I'm sending as “No reply necessary.”. That way I could offer the message as metainformation instead of writing it out in the body of the letter. That would be more inobtrusive and I would feel less silly. Another advantage would be that the recipient would be able to filter e-mails that didn't need a reply to an FYI-folder. It would certainly speed skimming e-mail up quite a bit, and recipients would feel less stress and bad conscience for not replying to everything.

I get enough spam marked as “URGENT!” that the technical implementation shouldn't be a problem.

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