Google today announced a small but cool update to Gmail. For a number of email, Google will now show action buttons next to email in your inbox that let you take a small set of actions without even opening the message. The cool thing about this, however, is that it’s open to developers, who can now use the schema.org markup language to add their own actions to Gmail messages.

Google says developer could, for example, be used for confirmation emails when somebody registers to a site, or developers could present magazine subscribers with a one-click action to renew their subscription, review a product, movies, restaurants or services.

Declaring these actions should be easy for developers, who simply have to add a pretty straightforward piece of code to their emails.

More importantly, this also makes emails more interactive than ever before. For the most part, email providers do not allow any code to run inside an HTML email. While Microsoft has experimented with whitelisting a few email senders and allowed them to run scripts inside the inbox, Google seems to be willing to open its system up to any developers.

It’s important to note that the company has implemented a couple of security measure that should ensure that the user’s information remains safe. All actions, for example, have to be handled via HTTPS URLs and hosts must have vaild SSL certificates.

myERP, a popular all-in-one cloud-based business app for accounting, billing, project management and CRM, for example, has already implemented the buttons and others will surely follow very soon.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Just about two years ago, I went off the deep end. I had come home early from an event in an effort to do something responsible: email. I was on the road and knew the situation would be dire (since I had not been checking my email all day). I was wrong. It was a disaster. It may as well have been Inbox Trillion. There was no way I could get through it all with my sanity intact. So I did the only logical thing. I quit email.

It was both an experiment and a statement. I decided that I wasn’t going to respond to email for an entire month. And while I did cheat a little (I would still check it from time-to-time in case of emergencies and to delegate some work-related items that couldn’t wait), it was without question one of the best months I’ve ever had.

I was decidedly less stressed out. I found myself enjoying the internet more. I no longer dreaded opening up my laptop or looking at the push notifications on my phone. And guess what? If someone really needed to talk with me about something, they figured out a way. Funny how that works.

And yet, the good times couldn’t last. The month came to a close and I was back on email. While I don’t think I actually missed anything in my time away, the sheer ubiquity of the medium and the realities of life brought email back into my life full time.

And I hate it more than ever.

In the months and now years following the experiment, a number of people have asked for an update on my epic battle with email. The good news is that a few things have gotten much better. The bad new is that everything else has gotten much worse.

After my experiment, I tried a bunch of different things to make my email situation more tenable. What I ended up coming to was a system where I would be checking email constantly throughout a day, responding to what I could quickly from my phone, archiving anything that didn’t need a response, and keeping the rest in my inbox until late at night, when the incoming volume would drop to near zero. Anything that wasn’t timely would then sit in my inbox until the weekend when the incoming volume is uniformly lower.

It was a bit like letting pressure build up (quite literally, you might say) and releasing a bit of it at night so my inbox wouldn’t explode. And then releasing the rest of it every weekend. And then starting over on Monday. Every Monday. Forever.

This was my life. And while it was manageable, you know what? It still sucked. Because I would find myself getting gradually more and more stressed out throughout the week as I saw my inbox grow and grow leading up to the weekend release. It made me more stressed out on Friday than on Monday. I now somewhat dreaded the weekend. Email time.

Then one day a CrunchFund portfolio company asked to run an idea by me. That company, Orchestra, was planning to take what they had learned from their to-do list app and make a new kind of email client. That, of course, became Mailbox.

From the moment I first heard the idea, I knew it was a winner. It was essentially taking a lot of what I was manually doing with email and streamlining the process. And they were doing it in an extremely smart and even sort of fun way, using the native niceties of modern smartphones.

Mailbox quickly became my most-used app. It still is. It basically alleviates the pressure build-up in my inbox by allowing me to release it constantly throughout a day. Brilliant.

But also sort of an illusion.

I’m not alleviating the pressure by responding to emails right away. Instead, I’m pushing them off to deal with at a later time. My system of responding to emails at night or on the weekend is largely the same, I simply no longer have to watch those emails build up until I am ready to take action.

Now, don’t underestimate how wonderful such a system is. And it’s a system that will continue to improve with automations and the like now that Mailbox has the resources of Dropbox behind them. But don’t be fooled into thinking that the problems of email have been solved. The underlying issues very much remain.

Mailbox simply perfected the game of Whac-A-Mole that we all play.

One major issue that remains with email is the notion that every message should get a response. And a big reason why I hate responding to email during the day is that too many people are too quick to respond to my reponses. For every email I send in the day, I seem to get two in return — often immediately. (As a result, this caged animal has been learning not to touch the electric fence — hence, night and weekend emailing.) And a large number of those responses are “K” or “Cool” or “Great” or “Thx” or some other banality best left unemailed.

The problem with these responses, even the short ones, is that they all take time to consume. If I read them in Gmail, it takes a couple seconds to load the response. And then another couple seconds to archive it. If I read them on my phone, I have to wait a few more seconds to download the messages from the server. Not to mention the push notifications that come in alerting you to the new message, taking up yet more precious seconds.

Seconds make up minutes, which make up hours, which make up days, which make up months, which make up years. One day we’ll all be laying on our death beds wishing we hadn’t wasted all that time reading a million “K” email responses in our lives.

Email needs some sort of quick response or maybe even a no-response reply system. Maybe it’s read/unread states that all recipients can see. But that’s been tried before and understandably, some people don’t like others to know when they’ve read a message. So maybe it needs to be a simple checkmark, like Path recently introduced in its new messaging system.

Or maybe the answer is something like emoji/smilies/stickers. Believe me, I know how lame this must sound. I mean, stickers for Chrissakes?! But ignore the immense cuteness and joy of stickers for a second and focus on what they signify: an ultra-quick way to express a reaction. This could work for email too.

Neither of these things would work if they simply came in the form of yet another email response — thus, defeating the purpose. Rather, these should be in the form of some sort of quick-loading visual cue that resides *on top* of an email system. That would likely require everyone using the same email service (unless this somehow became a new standard that every email service provider adopted — not gonna happen). But perhaps a fall-back system could be put in place to deliver these quick messages in email form if the recipient isn’t using the correct email service (giving them an incentive to sign up).

I guess my point is that while we’re seeing a lot of services come out with new and interesting ways to combat email overload — beyond Mailbox, see: Handle, Triage, Evomail, Mail Pilot, and many others — the only way email ever truly gets “fixed” is to be completely re-imagined. It doesn’t need a paint job, it needs a demolition job.

My fear is that this will never happen. We’ll keep getting better tools to handle email on various devices (on your iPhone, on your iPad, on your iWatch, on Google Glass, etc) but eventually the moles will become too quick and plentiful for any of us to whack.

At that point, email will become something we only use for work while we use some other quick messaging system for everything else. This is already happening to some extent — when was the last time you sent an email for “fun”? — but the messaging world is increasingly fragmented and not universal.

Earlier this week, I announced my next step professionally. It resulted in over a hundred emails of well-wishes and congratulations. These should have left me feeling wonderful. They did not. Unfortunately, the medium has become the message.

[Disclosure: It would probably be easier for me to list where I *don't* have some sort of conflict in the things mentioned above — see here. The one thing I'm not conflicted about: how much I hate email.]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I hate using email. I get an average of 60 to 70 emails every day, and only one precent of them are from people I actually care about. Using email today is all about sifting through the clutter. Dextr is an app that helps you accomplish that by filtering your inbox to only include emails from your friends and family.

Dextr is an email client for Android that functions a lot like Priority Inbox for Gmail, only it’s a standalone app. Once you’ve downloaded the app to your phone and signed into your email account, it presents you with a list of your contacts. Here you select your closest friends, family, or associates – basically, the people you’d actually want to receive email from. Once you’ve done that, Dextr only shows you emails from this list of persons who are important to you.

So while Dextr won’t (and probably shouldn’t) be replacing Gmail as your primary email client on your Android phone, having your inbox stripped down to nothing more but your own personal interactions is strangely refreshing. I abhor all the crap that ends up in my inbox, and being presented with one made up only of emails that I would actually care to read just felt nice. This is what email used to be before it became a firehose.

And yet, the fact that Dextr functions less like an email client and more like a messaging app says a lot of about how we use email today. The moment I opened up Dextr, I was struck with this sudden urge to start emailing my friends and having epic threaded conversations again. That’s where Dextr succeeds, but it falls short once I realize that this is in fact, email. I rarely if ever communicate with my friends via email anymore. Messaging apps, Twitter, and Facebook have pretty much taken over that space. And although Dextr has one of the prettiest interfaces I’ve ever seen in an Android app, email at the end of the day is still email.

Dextr is a little strange. It’s too bare bones just yet to function as a fully realized email client. You can’t send attachments (only view and download the ones that are sent to you), and threaded conversations are still a no-go. On the other hand, it’s a beautiful app, and perfectly performs the function of filtering your inbox down to the people you care about.

For me, that feature alone is enough to keep it on my phone. At least I won’t get any crap from my friends for accidentally grouping an email they sent to me along with my spam. Dextr is a $0.99 download at the Google Play Store.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Menlo Ventures partner Shawn Carolan searched for over five years to find an investment tackling the problem of email overload. Carolan, who led investments in Apple-acquired Siri among others, personally faced his own productivity challenges, and after not being able to find a startup that addressed all the problems he felt needed to be solved, he decided to build it on his own. Handle, which is launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013, is Carolan’s brainchild.

Carolan, along with his co-founder Jonathan McCoy, describes Handle as an operating system for your life. There are 600 million knowledge workers who spend 20 hours a week processing emails. Many get to inbox zero several times a week but Carolan says that this achieving inbox zero by deleting, archiving and starring emails doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of prioritizing your inbox with simple interactions, and creating tasks from these emails.

Handle offers a rich web app as well as a companion native iOS app that integrates with Gmail (and soon Microsoft Exchange and Yahoo) to pull in your emails. In its current state, Handle is a much better and faster way to sort through emails and create tasks at the same time.

The app allows you to capture ideas, triage your inbox, plan a schedule for the day and focus on your priorities. The centralized UX feature is the ‘Handle bar,’ which Carolan says was inspired by Siri’s ability to simplify interactions with deep capabilities of a system. The Handle bar, which is patented, allows you to annotate emails with deadlines, snooze emails, create projects, cluster emails together and more.

Here’s how Handle works: Your inbox flows into a JavaScript web app, and you can respond to emails inline. The basic idea is to triage your emails quickly and efficiently also being able to create a task management list. In each email you can decide whether to flag, delete, create into a project, or archive. If you decide to flag to respond later, you choose whether to flag as must do, should do or want to do and Handle will create a prioritized list of emails you need to respond to. What makes this interesting is the speed at which you can triage your email. Each action can be done by simply pressing one key (i.e. click 1 for must do, 2 for should do and so on).

All of this triage takes place within the Handle bar. As Carolan explains, the Handle bar is one of the central UX elements to the application. The startup figured they could solve overload if every email you saw could be handled by expressing what you wanted done with it and it happened. Instead of dictating by voice or typing full words, Carolan and his team decided to derive intent within a few keystrokes.

And Handle creates a general list of tasks that needs to be done using this data. This ‘capture’ phase is similar to existing to-do lists, allowing rapid entry of current tasks. Handle also places your priorities on a daily working calendar, assigning tasks to time, in the proper order.

Carolan says that current email programs create a ‘blunt’ instrument for organizing our lives. Folders, mark as unread, and flag/stars/labels are as much as most people use. Handle makes it easy to add context to your tasks so you can execute on them more efficiently. For example, if there’s a task you want to do at home on the weekend, you can snooze it until Saturday to get it out of sight until then. Whenever a task is created in Handle, you just have to hit to expose all the possible metadata options and then continue typing.

Handle’s iOS app is designed as a simple way you can access your tasks and priorities, and is a pared down version of its web cousin when it comes to functionality. You can see tasks, and send notes to yourself to add to your task list. The app itself is not an inbox but eventually will become one in the future.

Currently Handle cannot replace your Gmail inbox (for example, Handle doesn’t have a search functionality yet). But in the future, it’s safe to assume that Handle will be building an arsenal of tools to allow you do much more than just triage emails and turn emails into tasks. Eventually Handle will serve as your calendar, and you’ll be able to combine your schedule of meetings with your Handle tasks. You could also envision Handle adding other types of messages into the inbox such as Twitter DMs, says Carolan.

In terms of revenue, Handle plans to implement a freemium model and will eventually roll out a pro version with enterprise features.

The startup has raised $4 million in funding from Menlo Ventures (Carolan is still advising the startups he supports at Menlo, and remains a partner but won’t be sourcing any new deals for the time being). The startup has quietly been testing the app with tech executives and have received positive responses. For example, David Fischer, VP of Advertising and Global Operations at Facebook says that Handle has made him much more efficient.

As Carolan explains, Handle is disruptive because no one has designed a solution for the full life cycle of a user’s day. While high-powered email clients want to help you get to inbox zero, many of these clients don’t allow you to also handle productivity and task management.

Handle aims to differentiate itself by focusing on the whole life cycle of email from capture, to triage, to planning, to focusing. Second, Handle spans the desktop and mobile. While mobile is valuable for triage, most of the important work still gets done at the desktop, says Carolan. Handle also natively integrates email and task functionality, without the need to forward emails to task managers.

He admits that it takes a little bit of time to get used to the shortcuts, the UI and general behavior around Handle. But he firmly believes that Handle is presenting a new way of thinking about modern work that maps to how the world’s most effective people get things done. As we mentioned above, Handle’s aim isn’t just to help you handle your professional email and tasks in a more efficient way, it’s designed to add productivity to your entire life. It’s not just for the executive, it’s also for the busy mom, or the college student.

Q&A

Sam Yagan: Are there any one of these features that are a gamechanger?

SC: It’s the package of features, called the Handle Habit. You need to use the features together.

John Frankel: Is this a product for enterprises or consumer?

SC: Initial product will be free. Over time, we imagine going after enterprise features over time.

Frankel: My suggestion is get to revenue early and find out what people will pay more for.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yahoo has just released a shiny new dedicated Yahoo! Mail application for iPads and Android tablets, following up on the big Mail interface overhaul they started rolling out back in December.

While it’s your pretty standard email client at its core, it’s got a clever trick or two packed up its sleeve that definitely make it worth checking out.

At launch, Yahoo! Mail looks like just about any other tablet mail app that came before it (albeit a bit more… purpley.)

You’ve got your inbox’s contents running down the left, and clicking any of your messages opens them in the view on the right.

At the bottom of each email is a lil’ fullscreen icon. Tap that, and…

Poof! goes the interface. All of the app’s chrome fades away, and all the useless email header muck is stripped out. You’re left with just the subject line, the list of recipients, and the body of the email. Tap the screen, and a floating bar with all of the common functions (reply, forward, trash, etc.) briefly fades into view.

Once you’re in the fullscreen view, the email reading experience becomes a bit like that of reading a magazine. Each email is its own page; swipe from right to left and the current page rolls away, replaced by the one behind it. It may seem like a trivial change, but it makes for a pretty damn good email reading environment. I can worry about one email at a time, forgetting about the endless abyss that lays behind it.

Speaking of endless abysses, they’ve also come up with some pretty neat stuff to help get you to inbox zero.

As you may have noticed in that top screenshot up above, each message in the email list has a lil’ checkbox next to it. Check the box, and you’ve got all the standard options — toss it, archive it, favorite it, whatever. Nothin’ new there, right?

Once you check a few more emails, however, Yahoo! starts to get pretty clever. The right view — the one normally reserved for displaying your email — becomes a running list of all the emails you’ve checked so far. Rather than having to scroll up and down your seemingly endless inbox to remember which messages you’ve checked, you’ve got that info at a glance.

This right-most list is automatically grouped by sender, and each group is independently actionable. You can toss all the emails from one group of checked emails into the trash and another group into archive — or you can perform one action on everything you’ve checked en masse.

But it gets neater! Lets say you’ve got a few dozen Facebook notification emails splayed out across your inbox. Once you’ve checked one or two of’em, Yahoo! Mail will pick up on what you’re doing and offer up a one-tap button that auto-checks all similar messages from the same sender. For those of us who find ourselves in never-ending inbox triage mode, it’s a nice touch.

One annoyance that might nag the more hardcore Yahoo! Mail users out there: like the iPhone app that came before it, it seems that this new iPad app only supports a single Yahoo! Mail account at a time.

Beyond that, the whole app is really quite slick. While there’s nothing completely earth shattering, it all comes together into what feels like a super polished, super-thought-out experience.

Good job, Marissa. This thing actually has me considering using Yahoo! Mail again.

The updated app doesn’t seem to be live at the time of publishing, but it should be available for iOS here and for Android here quite soon.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Zuckerberg and tech elite create FWD.us – Mark Zuckerberg this week announced FWD.us, a political advocacy group to focus on the issue of immigration reform. The organization is backed by other tech leaders including Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt, Marissa Mayer, Drew Houston, Ron Conway, Chamath Palihapitiya, Joe Green, Jim Breyer, Matt Cohler, John Doerr, Paul Graham, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi. Reports about the group starting coming out recently, but Zuckerberg officially announced FWD.us with an editorial piece in the Washington Post on Wednesday. He called for “comprehensive immigration reform,” “higher standards and accountability in schools” and “investment in breakthrough discoveries in scientific research.”

Paid messaging test rolls out to U.K. – Facebook has expanded its paid messaging test, according to The Guardian. The social network is prompting some users to pay to send direct messages to another user’s inbox rather than their “other” folder. Facebook has a two-folder messages system. Communications from friends and other close connections appear in the inbox, whereas messages from users who don’t have mutual friends or messages that originated as an email to a user’s @facebook.com account are likely to be sent to the “other” folder. As part of the limited test, which began in the U.S. in December 2012, senders whose message would have appeared in the recipient’s “other” folder will have the option to pay to have the message routed to the inbox instead. Typically this costs about $1, but the company is testing higher price points for celebrities and public figures on the site.

Facebook expands free anti-virus software program – Facebook this week expanded its AV Marketplace program by supporting seven new languages this week: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Korean, Japanese and Portuguese. Through the program more than a dozen partner companies provide free security software downloads to prevent Facebook users from becoming victims of viruses and phishing attacks. AV Marketplace originally launched in April 2012.

Video doubles engagement on Facebook – Facebook users are more than twice as likely to comment, share or like video content than with non-video content, according to a study published by Adobe this week. Nearly 90 percent of all online video consumption occurs on desktops, but overall, mobile video viewing grew by 300 percent. Tablets are growing the fastest in terms of mobile video usage. Adobe’s analysis was based on nearly 20 billion video starts, 10 billion ads served by Adobe media customers and more than 450 million Facebook posts in 2012.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

410 Labs, home to products like Shortmail and Replyz, was trying to fly under the radar when it first launched Mailstrom, a new email service aimed at helping those who consistently receive large numbers of email messages daily achieve “inbox zero,” so to speak. But those plans were soon thwarted, when the company was surprised by unsolicited bloggers’ reviews, followed by sudden, rapid growth.

Over the past 30 days, the service grew 525 percent, now reaching over 412 million emails in storage. It has helped its user base of some 35,000 (before its official debut, mind you) remove around 115 million messages from their collective inboxes. And over 20 million new messages are being cleared from users inboxes per week.

Explains 410 Labs’ CEO David Troy, the company had made the Mailstrom product public after a year of active development, but had specifically refrained from making a formal announcement while they continued to do user surveying, general testing, and making tweaks to the product. But the blog posts, while positive, forced the company to go live a little earlier than expected.

“We’ve spent the past four to five weeks adding additional server capacity and creating better queuing mechanisms - similar to what the Mailbox guys went through with their scaling growth,” Troy explains. “We didn’t want a big rush of traffic until we were ready for it,” he says, “but it came when it came, and it was organic…so it was good.”

And yes, now Mailstrom seems to think it’s ready for more.

So what’s the big draw here? The company promises to help users cut through the clutter of their email inbox, in order to achieve that mystical state of “inbox zero.” In some ways, it is similar to the recently acquired Mailbox application, as both companies want to help their users get to the mail that matters faster. But Mailbox was designed as a mobile-first company, and Mailstrom is a web application. Also – and this is important – Mailstrom is not trying to replace users’ inboxes by functioning as another email client.

“We didn’t want to say ‘this is the new email environment which you must use,’” says Troy. ” It’s a power tool. It’s more like a machete which you can use to whack through the stuff that’s in the way of seeing what’s really important. Then you can use your normal tool set as you wish,” he explains.

The service, which currently supports Gmail/Google Apps, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft Outlook.com/Hotmail, Aol (disclosure: TechCrunch parent), and other IMAP-enabled email services, instead presents a different view of your inbox which lets you sort and sift through your mail in a variety of ways.

You can view messages by Sender or Size, group them by Subject or Time; you can click to see only messages and notifications from social services like Facebook and Twitter, for example, or those from retailers. You can filter for newsletters, ads, and you can quickly unsubscribe from mailing lists. You can also quickly set up rules as to how to deal with all of the above, to keep your inbox even more cleared out in the future. (LifeHacker has a very detailed “how to” for more on all this, so we’ll avoid the nitty-gritty details).

Of course, some of the things that Mailstrom does today can already be handled by Gmail or others’ own built-in feature sets, but with a perhaps less intuitive set of tools.

“What we’ve done is exposed and made easy a set of processes that a lot of people maybe could do but they haven’t really thought to do it,” says Troy, “or the tools to do it are a little bit clunky or a little bit hard.” He notes that even among Mailstrom’s core user base, where people are receiving a large amount of email, not everyone even knows basic things like what the Gmail “Archive” button does, much less how to dig and use Gmail’s filtering capabilities.

That we now need a third-party to help us better deal with our inbox, sadly, speaks to the stalled innovation taking place within some of these larger email services today. Why shouldn’t an email machete be a feature within our preferred email program by now? (Microsoft’s Outlook.com, with its “Sweep” functionality, deserves some credit for  understanding what’s it’s like to need to rapidly move emails out of the inbox with a click. But even that’s doesn’t come close to the functionality promised by Mailstrom.)

For Those Who Get A Lot Of Emails

That being said, this service is not for everyone.

“We’re not ideal for people who have 17 emails in their inbox. That’s not who this is for. It’s for people who, on a routine basis, get 50-plus emails a day that require attention,” says Troy. And by that he means, 50 personal emails – the stuff that’s left after removing all the cruft. Like many entrepreneurs, Troy built the product from personal need, getting hundreds of emails per day himself.

The company plans to charge for the service in the future, but it’s free for now. The prices will be reasonable, from what we hear. However, to really scale this thing, 410 Labs’ needs more than subscription revenue. That’s why the startup is nearly the close of its next round of funding, technically a Series B. The startup had raised an A round in 2011, which was really more of seed round. Investors in the previous included True Ventures, 500 Startups, Fortify.vc, and others.

Baltimore-based 410 Labs is now a team of 5 full-time, including serial entrepreneur Troy and co-founder Matt Koll, an early search pioneer. The next round will help the company hire and scale, but Troy claims the plan is not to quickly flip the company in some sort of “acqui-hire” deal. “We don’t want to go work for Google or Dropbox or something,” he says. “We think this is an important problem, and not one people are thinking imaginatively enough about today.”

Mailstrom is now taking sign-ups here, and currently there’s no queue. (That will likely change following this post as the service gets hit with clicks from readers.)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Dave Girouard is founder and CEO of Upstart, a company that lets college grads raise capital in exchange for a small share of their future income. Previously he was president of enterprise at Google. Follow him on Twitter @davegirouard.

“Nobody uses email anymore – you get too much of it” – Yogi Berra

In last Sunday’s New York Times, we were treated to another rant about how dysfunctional and burdensome email has become. This particular piler-on lays the blame at “how stagnant the format of email has remained, while the rest of communication and social networking has surged light years ahead.”

Really? If you ask me, I think the problem exists largely between keyboard and chair (see illustration).

I don’t mean to say that email providers can’t do a better job of serving their users (raise your hand if you don’t want Gmail to be faster), but innovation in email is anything but stagnant. In my view, the 30-year old “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol” (aka SMTP) has served us remarkably well, and continues to do so.

I’ve always felt that the “overwhelmed by my inbox” meme was a combination of humblebrag and mismanagement. Those Twitter posts bemoaning too much email often sound like somebody complaining about too many invitations to the prom – an “everybody wants me” or “I’m in such demand” kind of boast. In reality, a lot of people do have too many messages in their inboxes, but it’s hardly the fault of email itself. They’re just doing it wrong.

Another popular bromide suggests email is an evil time suck that prevents us from getting work done. For many – particularly engineers, designers, artists, or writers who need extended periods of concentration – this is undoubtedly true. Email can be a distraction that breaks our concentration if we allow it to do so. But for many of us, email actually is our work – or at least a vital part of it.

I’m bemused by the CEOs who declare their companies are giving up email…We tried that. It was called the ’80s.

If I followed the popular guidelines suggesting one should only check email once or twice a day, I can virtually guarantee it would slow down our progress at Upstart. To a large extent, email is how we communicate and get things done. At Google, my prior employer, I can state confidently that the company would (and did) grind to a halt if email weren’t available.

I’m bemused by the CEOs who declare their companies are giving up email. Why? So they can go back to those oh-so-productive in-person meetings and phone calls? We tried that. It was called the ’80s. For what it’s worth, I’m a big believer that there are many conversations that are better had on the phone, or in person, but that in no way minimizes the monstrous productivity improvements that email has wrought. What company has lasted even a month without email?

The ultimate obituary for email is that it’s for, well … old people. Millennials will tell you that email is where they go when they want to write a formal letter (how us GenXers thought about actual letter writing) or to get my Amazon receipts. There is some truth to this. Without question, text messaging has taken its rightful place as a superior and universal tool when the message is short, and the timing is now. And we should be glad to get that stuff out of our inbox. Yet somehow it hasn’t left our inboxes barren.

And what of Facebook and Twitter? Or those myriad enterprise social apps that spell doomsday for email? There’s a reason why the newsfeed of your favorite social app can’t and won’t replace email. Using a social stream to contact somebody is akin to driving past your friend’s house in order to visit them. Yes that’s right – just smile, wave out the window, and keep on going, rather than pulling into their driveway. That’s the newsfeed. The more these social products attempt to implement more directed forms of messaging, the more they create half-baked (or even lesser) versions of email. I should admit that there’s one area where Facebook has left email in the dust: you never need to remember or update another email address. But the price you pay, in terms of reliance on a single and proprietary platform, is steep. This is an obvious shortcoming of email that should be fixed.

By the way, if email is dead, why is it that every social/local/mobile app in the world is intent on notifying you via email every time a butterfly flaps its wings? Because that’s the only place you’ll reliably receive the notification and re-engage with their app.

Listen here, email haters. That protocol from 1982 called SMTP, and the ecosystem of applications and services based on it, are blessed with certain virtues that we’ve all taken for granted. First, it’s not controlled by any one company. Like SMS, SMTP is a very basic communication protocol that allows for virtually unlimited innovation around it. Threaded conversations? Check. Priority inbox? Check. Forgotten attachment detector? Check. And as Mailbox has shown, by building a simple feature that pushes emails off until a time you feel like receiving them, you can build a company that will receive countless term sheets from venture capitalists (presumably in your inbox).

To the piler-on at the New York Times, I have a few suggestions to relieve the dread you apparently feel each time you come face to face with your inbox:

1. Use a modern email service that has features that put you in control. I’m naturally partial to Gmail, as almost half a billion people on the planet seem to be.

2. Turn off social network notifications. They seem to be such a huge source of your angst, yet they don’t need to be. Just turn them off.

3. Don’t sign up for mail lists unless you really need to. Nobody can force you. Ok, maybe your boss can. But this is mostly in your control.

4. Filter stuff out of your inbox that isn’t urgent. The glory of virtually unlimited email storage (an innovation of the last eight or so years) is that you don’t have to keep everything in your inbox, yet you can find it when you need it or browse through it when you have time.

5. If, after carefully considering and adhering to the advice above, you’re still inundated with a tidal wave of unwanted email, you might consider being grateful that people actually take the time to write you.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook today announced a small test that will allow some users to pay to send direct messages to another user’s inbox rather than their “other” folder. The social network is also releasing new filtering options for users to help users indicate who they want to see messages from.

Facebook has a two-folder messages system. Communications from friends and other close connections appear in the inbox, whereas messages from users who don’t have mutual friends or messages that originated as an email to a user’s @facebook.com account are likely to be sent to the “other” folder. For the most part, this reduces spam, but it also hides some messages that users would want to see.

Now in a limited test among a portion of U.S. users, a sender whose message would have appeared in the recipient’s “other” folder will be prompted with the option to pay $1 to have the message routed to the inbox instead. If the sender chooses not to pay, the message will still be sent but not to the main inbox. Messages sent to the “other” folder do not generate any notifications for the recipient, so they are not always viewed right away. This test is only for user-to-user communications. Companies cannot pay to send messages to consumers. There is also a limit so that users can only see one of these types of messages in their inbox per week, although the message will not be designated as paid in any way.

A Facebook spokesperson suggested that professionals who met at a conference might be among people who would find use for this feature, as well as recruiting managers looking to contact a potential job candidate. These are similar reasons that people use LinkedIn’s InMail, however, there are some differences between the products. InMail is part of a LinkedIn premium account, which users pay monthly subscriptions for. In this test, Facebook provides the option to pay a small amount on a case-by-case basis. InMail allows LinkedIn users to contact people they would not otherwise have been able to message, whereas Facebook is allowing people to pay for priority delivery, not the message itself. LinkedIn also guarantees a response, and if a sender does not get a reply within a week, they can send another InMail message for free. Facebook is not currently testing anything like this, but the social network does show read receipts when a message has been viewed.

Public figures who have enabled subscribers will also be included in the test, but the company is testing a higher price point than $1 to have messages routed to these users’ inboxes.

As announced last week, Facebook is eliminating the setting that allows users to designate “only friends” as being able to message them. This was necessary after the social network launched Messenger for Android, which lets users without Facebook profiles to create Messenger accounts using their phone number. As Facebook’s messaging platform evolved to support emails, group messages and now Messenger-only accounts, the “friends” setting became less relevant.

Starting today, all users will have a choice between “basic filtering” and “strict filtering” for messages. Basic filtering will be similar to how most users’ inbox currently works. They’ll mostly see messages from friends and friends of friends, but emails to their @facebook.com account, messages from Facebook for Android users who have their phone number, and group messages including some of their friends might also start appearing in the main inbox. Strict filtering will limit a users’s inbox to only friends, as well as the occasional message that another user paid to have routed there rather than the “other” folder. Strict filtering will be the default for users who previously had their messages set to “only friends.” Basic filtering will be the default for everyone else.

These are very simple settings that don’t give users the level of control they might want, but Facebook to use different signals to sort messages with better accuracy than a user would be able to up front with explicit privacy controls like ”only friends” or “friends of friends.” For example, a user might know someone who is not on Facebook but who has their phone number and wants to reach them using Messenger for Android. On the other hand, a user might be connected to people who make a lot of events or send a lot of promotional messages. Even though the users are “friends,” some of those messages might not be as relevant to a user. Facebook emphasizes that it is continuing to test what type of messages to send to the inbox and which to send to “other.” When users mark messages as spam or move messages from “other” into the inbox, they provide feedback that Facebook can use in the future.

With the option for users to pay to reach someone directly in the inbox, Facebook is trying to ensure that the most important messages are seen and spam is hidden or not sent at all. In a blog post about the test, Facebook wrote:

“Several commentators and researchers have noted that imposing a financial cost on the sender may be the most effective way to discourage unwanted messages and facilitate delivery of messages that are relevant and useful.

This test is designed to address situations where neither social nor algorithmic signals are sufficient.”

In October, we wrote about how Facebook’s code revealed mentions of “paid promotion” as a source for a message. It’s unclear whether that is related to today’s test or another potential product for promoted messages. Facebook could try opening the inbox back up to brands and businesses at some point, but it hasn’t publicly shared any intention to do so yet.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Every now and then, I get my hands on an application or a piece of technology that that I can’t wait to tell the rest of the world about. Something that is a joy to use, tackles a major problem in a totally intuitive way and makes otherwise difficult tasks unfathomably easy. Something that has the potential to fundamentally change the way we do things.

Mailbox, which was created by the makers of task management application Orchestra, is one of those apps.

It’s difficult to overstate how big the email problem is. Many of us struggle every day to keep up with the hundreds or thousands of emails that we get every day, each of which is asking for some action, whether it be to respond or archive or maybe save for later. But the tools for facilitate those actions have been somewhat broken, as most apps don’t deal with the decision-making it takes to cycle through mass quantities of stuff — some good, some bad, and some impossible to get to in any reasonable amount of time.

Very few really good apps have emerged to tackle this problem. A lot of people loved Sparrow, but I could never get too excited about it. It provided a pretty rich set of tools for moving emails around and making sure they got archived and were searchable — basically improving on things that the iPhone’s native mail app did poorly. But for me, Sparrow was always a little too feature-rich. It didn’t make getting through my email any easier, it just gave me more stuff to do with it.

In contrast, Mailbox takes a very stripped-down approach, providing a limited set of options for to dealing with email. It breaks incoming emails into three basic categories: Those you’d like to keep in your inbox, those you’d like to save for later, and those you’d like to get rid of as quickly as possible.

The whole thing is built on the concept of gestures, basically swiping left or swiping right over an email in your inbox to do something with it. Want to archive an email? A short swipe to the right will do that, clearing it from view. Want to delete? Try a longer swipe right.

But the most interesting aspect is the save for later option. Don’t have time for an email right now but want to respond at some point? Just swipe to the left. Once you do so, you’ll be met with a few options for when you want that email to appear in your inbox: later in the day (three hours later), tomorrow, on the weekend, next week, etc. It then clears those emails from the inbox but makes them easily accessible from the menu screen. It works the same for adding emails to lists, like a “read later” or “watch later” list. It just needs a longer swipe.

Otherwise, email in Mailbox works pretty much the same way as in other apps. You can read emails, reply, reply to all, forward, etc. If there’s one feature that’s missing, especially for advanced Gmail users, it’s probably the ability to label emails into different categories. But for me, the ease of archiving and search within the app makes labels completely unnecessary.

It’s difficult to argue with the results: I frequently strive for Inbox Zero but never quite get there, and I get antsy if there are more than say, 25 emails in my inbox at any one time. But with Mailbox, the only emails that are kept in my inbox are those which are important at the moment. I have a fair — but not overwhelming — number of emails that will return to me and be dealt with later, and the rest I’ve been able to archive or delete. (I’ve yet to take advantage of the Lists feature, which seems more for reminding oneself to read an article or watch a video at some unspecified future time.)

Orchestra was named the App Store’s 2011 Productivity App of the Year, so it should come as little surprise that Mailbox boosts productivity mainly by treating emails like to-dos. It might not work for everyone, but I’ve seen very few tools like it — especially for people like myself, people who are anal about having as little email in their inbox as possible.

The app is currently in beta testing, with plans to release sometime in the new year. Wanna see more? Watch this video:

Introducing Mailbox

Or check out these rave reviews from beta users:

Massive fan of apps that completely replace defaults in iOS. Recently: @mailbox for Mail and Fantastical for Calendar

—
Danny Trinh (@dtrinh) December 10, 2012

Very surprised at how much I’ve taken to dealing w/ email the @mailbox way. I’m already yearning for an iPad & Mac version

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Sahil Desai (@Sahil) December 10, 2012

Just started using @mailbox. Oh my this is interesting.

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Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) December 11, 2012

After using @mailbox for 1 day, it is now on my home screen. 1 inbox for mail and tasks is an interesting concept. Very swipe-able too.

—
Kevin Kaiser (@kevinkaiser) December 11, 2012

Article courtesy of TechCrunch