What wrong with e-mail packages?

The two most powerful e-mail packages are Microsoft Outlook and Qualcomm's Eudora. Neither one takes into account how most people process their messages and how they manage their workflow. Both need substantial improvement.

First, for many e-mails you sent, you want to keep track of whether the recipient ever responds to your e-mail. Assume you've loaned Tom your favorite book and now you'd like to ask him to return it. When you sent your e-mail, you calculate it should take one week for him to read the message, put your book in the mail, and for your book to arrive. You add an extra week for slack time. Thus, in two weeks you want to be reminded that you sent this e-mail to Tom, so that if your book has not arrived, you can send another e-mail or perhaps call him. What you'd like is when you send the message, you would have the ability to click an icon that says, "Remind me of this e-mail in the future" and a calendar would pop up and you'd be able to pick the date when your e-mail package would remind you.

(There is a primitive way I kind of do this. I send myself a blind cc of the e-mail and then file it in my "Waiting for a Response" folder. But I have to remember to check that folder every week or so, and the e-mails in that folder are not sorted by the date I want to be reminded of them, but rather by the date I sent them. So this doesn't work very well.)

Second, neither of these packages automatically files incoming and outgoing e-mails. Assume you have ten friends that you regularly with whom you regularly e-mail. You would probably create ten folders, one for each of them. The first folder is your folder for Peter. What I'd like is that you tell your package, "This e-mail address is Peter Smith's address. Store all incoming and outgoing e-mails to and from him in this folder." When you receive an e-mail from Peter, it would automatically create a copy and store it in his folder. His e-mail to you would also be stored in your In Box, so you knew to read it. It would be coded in a different color, so that you knew that a copy has already been filed in his folder. You could thus simply read his e-mail and then delete it, knowing that a copy was already stored in his folder, and you would not have to spend time moving that e-mail to his folder.

For sent e-mail, in most cases you want these e-mails automatically moved to his folder, rather than having them in your Sent folder. After all, presumably you know that you sent him a message.

In addition, there might some incoming e-mails that you want stored in a folder automatically without them ever showing up in your In Box. For example, I subscribe to a few electronic newsletters which I don't read very often. Rather, I just want to keep them in a folder and then when I'm interested in the subject, I can go to the folder and read them. An e-mail package should be able to do this.

This second feature is partially possible using Outlook's Rules Wizard and completely possible if you write some VBA code. But it doesn't work very well and I have found the Rules Wizard to be clumsy.

I would also like my e-mail package to handle group lists in a different way. I have a social e-mail list which has about 200 friends and acquaintances on it. As I receive announcements of various social events in Boston, I forward these e-mails to that group, which sends that e-mail as a forwarded e-mail, listing each person as a blind cc. (This prevents each person from seeing the e-mail addresses of the other 199 people.) The problem is that many anti-spam programs say, "James Mitchell is sending a blind cc to 200 people. He's probably sending spam." So they delete the e-mail. What Outlook should be able to do is say, "There are 200 e-mail addresses on that distribution list. I'm going to send this e-mail to each one of the 200 separately." In short, it would send 200 separate e-mails. That way, the anti-spam packages would simply see an incoming e-mail to one person and would have no reason to block it.

Both packages need to offer more flexibility in how they handle attachments that you e-mail. I have a brochure on my firm, Kensington Partners, which I update now and then. When I e-mail it to someone, I want to send the most current version. With Eudora, I can simply resend the e-mail, change the addressee, and it will send the current version and it will not store a copy of the brochure in my Out Box, but rather just the link. Outlook does it differently. When it saves the e-mail, it includes the attachment that you sent, consuming the extra disk space. If you resent it, it sends a copy of what you previously sent, even if the file has been changed in the meantime. This is good if you want to know exactly which version of a file you sent to someone, but is undesirable if (like me) you just want to send the most current version. Ideally Outlook and Eudora would offer you both options, and when you sent an attachment, it would ask you which option you want.

Read James' essay An Index of Computer Skills and Knowledge.

January 19, 2001, version 1.2   |    List of other essays written by James Mitchell    |    Copyright notice

Cite as “What's Wrong with E-mail Packages” by James Mitchell. January 19, 2001, version 1.2.
www.BostonConvivium.com/jm_essays/email_packages.