The bigger problem is that right now the whole computer using experience is organized around finding information. Think about it, how many people do you know who have have their browser homepage set to their email, Google, Google News, or some sort of news aggregator? Virtually everyone.

Why is this the case? Probably because we've only been able to get this firehouse of information for a relatively short period of time, so it's new and interesting.

I think the bigger opportunity is to step back and think about what our homepages will look like in 50 years. Somehow I doubt it will have anything to do with finding basic facts. Finding a better way to organize spam is thinking too small, I think you need to figure out a better way to integrate conversations and information into our broader life goals and daily lives.

I hope we don't have homepages in 50 years. Hopefully, by that point, HTML and JS won't be the only thing we're allowed to innovate by that point!

#3 is a doozie, and we've been working on it at Greplin. I think we can break it down into some subcategories:

* Notification emails that are very time-specific in their relevance. "Reminder: Coffee with Chuck at 3:25 today" or "Thank you for your reservation for a party of 4 at Alice's Restaurant at 7:30 tonight." You care about these a lot, until you have coffee with Chuck and abruptly stop caring.

* Things that are nice to have pass through your consciousness at some point. Amazon shipping confirmation emails, GitHub comment notifications, etc. Interestingly, most of these are mostly noise; when I get an Amazon confirmation email, the part I care about could fit in a Tweet: "Your Dromiceiomimus Plushie has shipped via USPS, with tracking number 54989086, and will arrive between Tuesday and Friday".

* Mailing lists. I have Gmail set up to tag all these and skip my inbox, which seems to be about right. The weird thing about mailing list emails is that almost all of them are explicitly marked as such -- there are several unofficial MIME headers for this -- and yet the default behavior for every email client I know if is to simply stick them in the inbox like any other email.

* Crap I don't care about. "Save up to 25% on useless ornamental doilies!!!1". The only part of this that I care about is the Unsubscribe link. I believe Gmail can auto-unsubscribe you if you mark these as spam.

Of course, while it's fine to break it down like this, the trouble starts when you start trying to actually extract useful information from emails so you can present users with a better view of their inbox. It's officially a Hard Problem, though like a lot of hard problems, you can get something useful with a lot less effort than getting something perfect.

What would you like from your inbox? For obvious reasons, I'm very interested. :-)

For me, "coffee with Chuck" is #2 rather than #3 and yes, I want it in my inbox (maybe simply stay there until it happens, then archive it automatically).

Your other examples are clearly #3... and I don't need to read any of those emails.

Amazon confirmation emails are completely useless since Amazon always ships on time; in the exceptional case where a package doesn't arrive, I can go fetch the tracking number somewhere to investigate; but reading these for every package is a waste of time.

Mailing lists should go to a special folder labelled "things to read on a rainy day".

And finally "crap" is spam, no?

- - -

What about a service that would let you give a special email address for Amazon confirmation emails, for example, that would receive these emails and index and categorize them. When a package doesn't arrive you go there to look for the tracking number, but only then.

Of course you can do that with tags in Gmail.

What you can't do in Gmail is to generate a single PDF of all proforma received from a given provider, for example.

Re: mailing lists. I think RFC 2919 is pretty official. List-ID is registered at IANA permanent message header field registry.

Has Greplin basically solved inbox being a todo list?

Gmail offers [email protected], which is sent to [email protected], but then you can filter on the To: field. I don't think that completely solves #3, but it's a helpful trick. Plus, then you can see how your email addresses get passed on, as long as whoever's got your email isn't clever enough to =~ s#\+.*?@#@# regex your address...

I love this feature, but unfortunately I've found that probably 30-40% of the websites that I supply with my email address will not accept it due to the "+" character. It seems like travel-related businesses are some of the worst offenders -- the vast majority of airlines and hotels seem to balk at the "+", which is frustrating, because "+travel" is one of my favorite filters.

Amusingly, this is almost certainly due to the legacy backend systems which still use a six-bit character set, and this set doesn't include helpful things such as lowercase characters or the + symbol.

Totally agree. For me it's a way to assess the quality of the website: be wary of websites that complain that emails can't contain a +.

If you have your own domain (which I think most people have on HN?) you can use different usernames to the same effect, or a different separator.

But even if it worked all the time it's only part of the solution.

#2: Google does have Gmail tasks, with keyboard shortcuts for using them. But because there isn't yet a tasks API it's hard to sync with other things.

Some thoughts:

1. Whatever the new email is needs to look and feel like email at the beginning, though it can morph into something else over time. It also needs to be completely keyboard driven and entirely API controllable on the client and mail server side. GMail's API is only so-so and a moving target.

2. It should be initially marketed at power users who can define sophisticated functions on emails or groups of emails. Those with 100s of emails a day feel the most pain right now.

3. On Stackoverflow, before you can submit a new question, it is intercepted and searched against the database to determine whether it has already been answered. Similarly, you could have something that directly links email to search of a corporate database. Before you hit send, it suggests alternate things you could look at: Google Docs, github, the general web. This search would be a combination of statistical NLP and deterministic rules set up by the system administrator, and would intercept many informational or TODO type queries.

4. You might do something much more interesting with auto-responders. E.g. someone asking for a meeting could be redirected to your calendar to self-serve schedule if they are on your "ok to meet" whitelist.

5. More interestingly, you might also allow API-hooks for trusted senders and receivers. For trusted senders within your own corporate network, you might allow them to put some kind of button or hook in the email to permit more structured responses than free text. For example, they could discharge the TODO directly without having to click a link and leave email. Or in the case of the CEO below, it would be "authorize payment". You might actually be able to make this work today within GMail with suitable iframing.

6. A properly configured mutt or Emacs gnus has many interesting features that could be ported to the browser.

> 4. You might do something much more interesting with auto-responders. E.g. someone asking for a meeting could be redirected to your calendar to self-serve schedule if they are on your "ok to meet" whitelist.

Yes. We already have SIRI, why doesn't this already exist...? It must exist somewhere and we're not aware of it, no?

I don't know how others do email, but for me, everything gets filtered and the inbox contains only emails I didn't know hot to categorize.

Mostly, I filter out 'family', 'friends', a few mailing lists, and some other random things, not to mention spam, and use "mark as read" liberally so that I always know what I have and have not looked at.

I don't really use the important markings or stars in Gmail, labels + archive are enough. Only important items stay in the inbox and they only stay there until dealt with, so I keep my inbox clean.

I don't get why PG is sharing all these great angles that Greplin should be working on, and as best as I can tell is perfectly positioned to tackle.

I don't think anything PG says in a talk like this is going to make a bit of competitive difference to a YC startup that works on this stuff full-time.

http://zeromail.com/ seems interesting.

I always thought that a simple first step would be to group messages by senders, but AFAIK the only client that does that is the concept client persona (http://personamail.info/).

Thanks for this, zeromail does seem very interesting!

The signup for the closed beta is $100 though, which is expensive just to test something.

Also, it seems that in order to use it you have to migrate to their service completely, which is a big commitment.

Having a service that progressively takes part of your emails would be less aggressive maybe.

My approach to #3 in gmail is to have filters that auto-archive, and then use multiple inboxes to show them under my main inbox email.

A replacement for email probably won't look very much like email. It'll inherit the good and drop the bad.

Speech ---> messenger ---> letters ---> telegraph ---> telephone ---> fax ---> email ---> ???

What's good about email? You can send it at any time. It's standardized and supported everywhere. UTF-8/UTF-16. Cheap/free. Extremely fast. Extremely easy.

What's bad about email? Spam. Conversations get broken (reply instead of reply-to-all). Prioritization must be done manually, and differs between the sender and receiver. Lack of privacy (PGP is a bandaid on a severed limb). Reading and interpretation takes time. Fonts, colors, and graphics can too easily be used terribly (e.g. the "view" is broken in MVC). Micro-managing messages and contact lists. Search (http://theoatmeal.com/pl/brain/memory). Conveying context and emotions is difficult. I'm sure you can can list more.

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I've been thinking about the prioritization issue, using a sort of expensive cipher, but for humans.

In the morning, Kate in accounting gets a call from their supplier for car engines. They demand $6.7M payment on an invoice 90 days overdue, and won't make the engine delivery tomorrow unless they get the cash wired to them by 5pm tonight. Kate knows they need those engines to put in cars coming off the assembly line tomorrow, so Kate sends an urgent message to Susan, the CEO. They have the cash, all Kate needs is Susan's approval to wire it.

Susan gets the message in her inbox marked "urgent", but doesn't read it. She has 1,000 other unread messages, 200 "urgent". Susan gets through 800 messages before leaving, but never gets to Kate's.

The next day Susan finally reads Kate's message and FREAKS OUT! She calls up the car engine supplier about the late payment. "Sorry, no engines today! Next time make sure you pay us on time!" Car assembly halts, productivity bottoms, and they start burning money from idle workers and sales lost to late car deliveries.

In a small company, Kate would just walk into Susan's office and remind her. In a large company, with a CEO who's "SO BUSY", or another human who's "SO BUSY", important messages like that can be read too late. Here, Kate knew it was really important, and marked it "urgent", but because too many other people cried wolf too, Susan never got the message.

So, how can you prioritize a message, relative to all other messages someone else has queued?

Imagine an economically-consuming task. We'll use time, but money could work too. When you press "Send", a button pops up. The more times you click on it continuously, the higher priority your message will be relative to others who clicked it fewer times. Your message isn't sent until you stop clicking for 5 seconds.

So, if you click your button for 10 minutes in a row, which is a total waste of your time, your message will appear higher on someone's message-queue than someone who clicked it for 9 minutes in a row.

Furthermore, when the receiver gets the message, and see's that you're a drama queen over-reacting on something that's really low-priority, she can down-vote you. Next time, 10-minutes of button clicking will only count for 5 minutes. The sender gets notified that they cried "wolf! wolf!" and can alter their behavior accordingly.

Clicking of a button doesn't have to be the actual task. It shouldn't be able to be automated (button-clicking can), and it should be boring (playing Tetris would be disastrous, yielding every message as URGENT).

Cash works too. If you cold-send an email to Bill Gates, he's probably not going to read it. What if you risked $100 sending the message? Bill has 48 hours to read/reply to it, otherwise the $100 goes back to you. If he does read/reply in 48 hours, he can keep the $100 (don't bug me again!), or return the $100 (let's keep chatting...).

Also somewhat related is Zed Shaw's Utu. It's a chat room where all messages are encrypted, and if you start annoying people they begin increasing the amount of work your computer has to do to encrypt the messages sent to them.

http://www.savingtheinternetwithhate.com/

There are some services out there where you spend an email specific currency in order to flag the importance of the email. I can't remember exactly how you earned them, but there were things you could do to earn these credits which then you spent by attaching them to your outgoing messages.

Cash is interesting though. I can imagine how it would technically work.. but would anyone actually pay? I think it depends on what sort of 'email problem' you have. I don't imagine someone's boss would be happy to get a notification that it costs $10 to send their employee an email ;) It seems this cash thing would work only for blind introductions to popular individuals.

The "button" solution can be cracked by exactly the people you'd rather not send you any email, ever: people who have a lot of time on their hands and can spend a day pressing a button (or, worse, have someone in India pressing the button for them).

The cash solution is interesting, but again, do you want only rich people to send you email?

I think the prioritization problem is hard because it can only be done by the recipient (not her secretary, not her colleague, not anyone but her).

But I also think that people hate to prioritize not because it takes time, but because it's incredibly boring and then stays in your mind (you remember you were bored, and you remember all the useless crap you had to go through).

But very important and very busy CEOs still watch TV or go to baseball games, so they do have time left; it's just that they'd rather watch TV than sort through their mail.

So the problem becomes: how do we make prioritizing fun?

(I have no idea how to answer that question, but rephrasing the problem is a first step).

You totally forgot that the evolution of messaging isn't linear. You skipped drums, which did not exist in europe, which almost monopolized technology as a source of inspiration. However, this anachronism is being reflected in modern communication. For example, drums were a broadcast method, and so was radio, and now so are social websites. Those three approaches (drums, radio, social sites) were re-invented over and over due to need. At each point in the improvement chain the broadcast nature was rejected as unwanted. Compare to what you said about only the good parts being taken to the next level. However, it's obviously needed.