Solving Email

As anyone who receives more than, say, zero emails a day can tell you, getting, writing, sending, sorting, and searching email sucks. It’s absolute shit. Your grandmother grabs a hold of your work address andsends you every cute cat junk mailer she receives from her bridge buddies. Your associates send you critical, last-minute changes (complete with three exclamation marks) expecting you to check your email in the five minutes between it being sent and the critical deadline. Perhaps your social group even uses an email list to talk about whatever is going on in your respective lives.

Email handles practically all use cases – correspondence, instant message, file-sharing, discount coupons, archive – but it handles them miserably. IT’s slow, horribly formatted, and worst of all, it’s misused constantly.

A major problem is the expectations surrounding email. We expect it to do all these things, and we expect it all to go off without a hitch; we are disappointed when the inevitable happens. Worse, we assumes that each and every user, the people we send to, receive from, knows and will conform to our own expectations. We expect different levels of formality, frequency of use, etc. But no one uses email in the same way, because email is so undefined in its use.

So how would one solve email? It isn’t simply a matter of shutting down your Gmail account, because that expectation is so firmly entrenched in our minds: everyone is available through email, if all else fails. And it isn’t a matter of replacing the service with some other, state-of-the-art system, because it isn’t much use if no one else uses the damn thing. So here are some basic criteria:

1. It has to do everything that email can do.
2. It has to coexist with current email.
3. It has to not suck.

Some basics, certainly, that need to be fleshed out more, which I hope to explore further in later posts. I imagine this to be a solution that takes an iMessage-like approach, where users can use the new method with other people similarly entrenched, and switches, without the knowlesge of the user, to normal, plain-old shitty email.

Because it really does suck.