What Does Email Need?
Visited 672 Times Published by Rico October 31st, 2007 in Internet, Rico's Ramblings, Spam, Tech and What.This may sound silly, but I really think email needs scheduled sending.
In other words, email clients should let you set when the message will be sent to your recipient, kinda like the ability to schedule posts.
You may be wondering why such a feature is important. After all, once you send an email to someone else, it ends up on their inbox and stays there, until they deal with it. But I think there are at least two situations where such functionality will be very useful.
You’re sending an email to a busy person
Nowadays, being a busy person means you get tons of email daily. From personal experience, some emails are received when it’s too early to deal with them. Getting a message about last-minute preparations for an event, for example, can’t be dealt with immediately. The recipient has to keep the message on their inbox until the day of the event arrives. Having to keep an email in the inbox adds to the clutter, and actually increases the chance that it won’t be opened when it’s time to refer to it.
You need to send a reminder regularly
Say you’ve agreed to regularly remind a recipient of the special tasks they have to execute on your behalf. Wouldn’t it be easier to just write the reminder once, then have it sent say, at the beginning of every month? No need to remember to do that certain something once the 1st comes around.
Of course, this feature can make it easier for spammers to annoy their victims. But I’m sure if people do a good job of combating spam, they can find a way to keep spammers from taking advantage.
So what do you think? Should email clients have scheduled sending? How else could such a feature be useful? If anyone already knows how to do this with Gmail, I’m all ears eyes.
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I know the second feature (regular reminders) is available with yahoogroups, and probably with googlegrops. Some groups send regular reminders about rules for posting in the group.
The first feature - well, that might be a bit harder to implement. I’d love to see that feature enabled in Thunderbird.
From what I know, this exists in Outlook (as a 3rd party plugin) and Thunderbird (Sendtools extension), though both not exactly as how it should (they require your email client to be on at the time of the supposed send; if you’re computer is off then you’re out of luck).
One good use for this for me is as a life hack for self-reminders. Set up a separate gmail account, and point your gmail notifier there to be notified when new mail arrives. There: portable reminder system, anywhere you have an email notifier.
Luis: Can you change the content of the reminder? If so, then maybe it could be a workable solution.
Rico: That is a problem… I think a true solution has to be implemented on a mail server, so that it can take care of sending scheduled messages.
Believe it or not, I already use my Gmail account as a checklist of sorts. Unarchived messages represent tasks I have to complete.
The way I’ve seen it used is this:
- a text file is stored for the whole group to access
- that file is sent out every month (or another set period) to all members of the group
I’m pretty sure it’s not too hard to change the contents of the file.
That only leaves the problem Rico mentioned, how to make sure the reminder will be sent even if your mail client’s off. Hmmmmm…..