[wordplay]

Fascinated by the nascent eco-system of apps built on top of email. To PG's point in one of his essays about fixing email...I wonder if the transition to the future of email lies in using email as a protocol.

As applications are developed that better utilize some of the structured data within email, do we eventually transition to a world where very few emails under a certain threshold are read...but instead parsed for information content. Thus potentially putting the receiver back in control of the overall experience?

[baydinalex]

I think you're right about email as a protocol.

There are a couple reasons I think we'll continue to read most of our messages, though: * If the automatic parser misfires on one out of 50 messages (a really hard threshold to hit, as we've learned from building BCal), you still have to review the messages it determined you "shouldn't read" - so it's really not adding a ton of value. Just saving you the step of clicking the delete button * Deleting junk email doesn't take very long - 80% of deletions happen in under 3 seconds.

That said, there's a ton of gray area for products like Boomerang Calendar, which facilitate the interaction you'd want to take, but don't choose it for you. We're working on some of those :)

Thanks for getting my brain's gears turning!