Archive for October 30, 2009

How many times have you been caught in this situation? Somehow through the string of bad luck, you get added to an email thread by someone, and for the life of that thread (sometimes someone will be kind and remove you from the email thread when it’s clear you have nothing more to be aware of or contribute) you receive pointless email garbage that wastes your time, clutters your inbox, and otherwise gives you stress because you feel bombarded by volumes of emails–but this is all for not because at the end of the day you don’t have anything to do on the email and you don’t need to be aware of the email contents/discussion. Ok, raise your hand if you’d have this happen or been the one to cause this to happen–everyone’s hand should be up!

This is a systemic problem with email, one of the most frustrating things to encounter. But there could be a silver lining in all of this. There needs to be two abilities:

1. The ability as a recipient to indicate that you do not want to receive further updates on the thread
2. The ability as the sender to remove someone from the thread

Now these may seem simple enough, but let’s think about this. For the first, you’ll need to have an email client that will understand the email client saying “I don’t want to see any more updates to this thread” and subsequently when you receive further emails, you are no longer notified of them.  But then what if you do this by accident? The sender has to have the ability to then FORCE an update to go through. So similar to marking a message as important, by marking the message as forced delivery, it will send a message through on the thread to all recipients on the message regardless of whether or not they’ve elected to continue receiving updates on the thread.

Second the sender needs to be able to be in a situation where if they recognize that there are individuals on the email thread that should no longer be on the thread, to select to remove them, but the act of removing them is not just simply to prevent them from appearing on future threads. By removing them through this “remove from thread” feature, that should:

1. Send a brief message to the person being removed, that they were removed from the thread, and an option to add themselves back into the thread.
2. Add a bit of meta information to the email thread, that will notify others that someone has been removed so they are aware not to address something to that individual

I think these features, if they could come true, would be the best thing that businesses could implement. Too much time is spent dealing with emails that come through, and each useless email is a distraction among other things. By giving control to people to make smart choices, it means that the right people can put their two cents in, but withdraw from the overall thread when their input is no longer required. Rarely is it the case that you are added mid-stream to an email thread, and you have to stay current with that thread through the life of the thread.