Making email more efficient – Would you use this?

[kavi14]

I've been stuck with this idea for a while so, I thought I would post it here to get constructive and honest feedback.

Problem: Email has become a frustrating experience and we waste a lot of time when it comes to finding the emails we need to pay attention to and then later sorting them.

Solution: An email client that is based around self-organizing folders.

This is a rough image of the main page: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11N0RGgYCs8juNKZxrDiEh1N3t9CItVn6/view?usp=sharing

How it works: - In the pic above, the emails are sorted automatically into the folders as you receive them.

- You can drag and drop the email in any folder and the folder will learn your preferences and adjust accordingly.

- Emails are shown according to the vertical order of the folder arrangement under "Inbox" and NOT in chronological order for each day. This way, you can organize the folders in the order that is important for you to see the emails as they arrive.

- „Clear" means, that it just clears those emails from what you are seeing there (emails are still stored in folders) so there is less clutter.

Would you pay a monthly subscription fee of $5-10 for a service like this? If not, please tell me why.

[dyingkneepad]

No. I don't believe any platform can auto-generate email rules better than I can. I'd absolutely hate if it ever happened that I missed an email because it got wrongly tagged with the low-priority label.

In fact, these days I have been relying on search a lot more. I just archive most stuff and then search when I need.

Also, I make a huge effort into unsubscribing from unwanted shit.

Edit: there's also the huge privacy issue in letting yet another company access my email. Why would I inflict that to myself?

[NikxDa]

I would in general not pay $5-$10 a month for a service if it doesn't provide huge value, which I think this would not - it saves time, but only so much. A one-time-payment model might be more suitable here...

[dddw]

Yes! All the services that start at 5 bucks... you can only want a couple of those and only indeed if you are actually using it enough to deem it valuable.

[openlowcode]

In my humble opinion, there are two problems to e-mail, and they are already solved in a product such as gmail. - Searching through the data works very well with gmail. I can retrieve all mails relevant to a topic very well. - Displaying conversation in an easy to read way.

I think it is nice to make very elaborate products, but simple technology, such as e-mail, is extremely powerful, as it is universal.

A slight comment: I usually look at the cost of the service for 3 years (the average time, say, I keep a laptop or smartphone). $5 or $10 per month is $150 to $300 for 3 years. That is quite a lot.

[ApolloRising]

Isn't this what email filters do in outlook and what labels and filters do in gmail? How would this be different?

[kavi14]

The position of the folder in the vertical order would determine how the email appear on your homepage and the sorting into folders is automatic after you feed it a few samples

[135792468]

Hey does this pretty well. The biggest pro to Hey is that I can say I don't want to get an email from someone and i'll never see it again. In Gmail if I unsubscribe or mark as spam, it is likely that I'll still see it the next time it is sent.

[kavi14]

Do you pay for Hey? I've seen Hey but I think they have the wrong concept.

[shahbaby]

No because I would rather spend a few minutes longer in email rather than experiment with the solution, especially for a subscription based service.

It might be useful for someone else but I imagine they've already found some other method to organize their emails.

[maxmouchet]

I really like the idea of displaying the folders and their content on the homepage! I would definitely pay for something like this, if it also has the possibility to create custom folders.

[bradknowles]

I would not pay for any third-party service to have access to my mailbox.

Pitch me something that I can run entirely locally on my own machine, and I might be willing to think about it.

[mindwok]

I wouldn't. I think I'd prefer a better search experience than automatic categorisation

[flarg]

ClearContext does some if not all of this