We all know email needs to change. It's so horribly inefficient, but how could we go about solving this problem? Slack is great for teams, but what about everyone else?
While I think the short/medium term solution is training people on how to use email as much as the software improvements itself, id love to see some smaller time saving features added like;
- A 'do you need to reply all' pop-up when people do a short thanks message. Kinda like the check for attachments.
- A 'drop me from this thread' button so the next reply-all person see a note that these people have been removed. Then they can add them back if needed.
- More personal statistics on email to chart how many you are getting and time spent etc. Seeing this might encourage people to be more efficient.
- Improve threading of emails to more like SMS. Outlook and Gmail ate both horrible on this. Opera M2 used to have quite good threading so perhaps the new Vivaldi team will improve this when they re-make the mail client.
Years and years ago there was some talk of having a "postage stamp-like" fee to send and receive e-mails. Enforced by the recipient's server, I guess. That way spam and low-quality memo-writing would be discouraged. Instead of monetary points it could be karma points or something. This didn't go anywhere 10 years ago, but maybe the time is ripe for it now. People are a lot more comfortable with micropayments and there's a lot better infrastructure for the necessary communication/negotiation between sender's and recipients' email.
- A 'do you need to reply all' pop-up when people do a short thanks message. Kinda like the check for attachments.
- A 'drop me from this thread' button so the next reply-all person see a note that these people have been removed. Then they can add them back if needed.
- More personal statistics on email to chart how many you are getting and time spent etc. Seeing this might encourage people to be more efficient.
- Improve threading of emails to more like SMS. Outlook and Gmail ate both horrible on this. Opera M2 used to have quite good threading so perhaps the new Vivaldi team will improve this when they re-make the mail client.