🧠🌪️ Brainstorm! What’s one thing that would make email way better?

Question

Something like 350B emails are sent every day (!) but no one I know is all that satisfied with email as a platform.

Complaints I hear most often are spam / lack of verified identity, threads getting unwieldy after many messages, formatting annoyances, and not enough fine grained control over notifications.

If you could change one thing about email to make it awesome, what would it be?

Liam Hale McCarty · Accepted Answer

@mrcraiggoodwin Agreed! What do you think are the best WhatsApp type features missing from email?

Answer

@liamhalemccarty That is so interesting to learn...I think spam is such a big issue that somehow this really needs to go mainstream. Other mediums tried to replace email but it's here to stay so we should try to fix it's biggest fault...and as you point out there is a solution.

Answer

A registrar system the same as for url's and some way of confirming all emails sent and received. So I'm thinking an individual certificate for each email address that mail servers can check to ensure the sender is authorised to send for that email address. I'm not technical and those in the know might be laughing right now 😃 but I'm just thinking how can we possibly come up with a more watertight system that will check mail and anything that can't be authenticated is killed before it hits anyone's inbox .....or better still never leaves an outbox.

Matthew Phillips · Answer

It feels like the email client needs to be reinvented for the age of AI. It's now possible for it to feel like a productivity hub rather than time-sink. Cool features it could have: - Much smarter search (i.e. semantic search) - Group emails by prompt or task instantly (no label needed) - Much more intelligent labelling - Pre-generated replies that learn from you - Compose in tone of voice - Knows your schedule so can help book meetings - Automated follow-ups if no reply - Analytics on your email usage - Advice on how to use more productively - Summaries of longer emails I massively increased my productivity when converting to the 'Inbox Zero' method (wrote about it here: www.superflows.ai/blog/inbox-zer...). An inbox with the above features could 10x that (and I'm trying to build it :) )

Craig Goodwin · Answer

@liamhalemccarty interesting I think it’s about user experience, lack of signatures. It’s something about formality….it’s a interesting thought 🤔

Craig Goodwin · Answer

A ‘messaging’ type experience, I don’t believe we have yet blended old school email with WhatsApp type efficiency 🤔

Bhavana Manjusha · Answer

A pinch of sense of humour combined with honesty - A couple of years back, we tried multiple outreach emails to re-engage our old clients. Finally, someone came up with this idea. While it's not verbatim, it was something similar along the lines of - "I'm shamelessly reaching out to all my clients who said they loved my product but never bought it again. I'd appreciate any feedback you've for me or pur product so that I can work on improvement"

We saw a 20x reply rate. In a world full of people trying to sell themselves, being honest and adding some humour goes a long way.

Liam Hale McCarty · Answer

@bhavana_manjusha I think that’s a great point. There’s not enough humor in email outreach! Emails are generally so boring and formal. A little laughter brightens the day

Liam Hale McCarty · Answer

@matthewdelta love these ideas!! I can imagine an AI powered email client being a great virtual assistant, automatically scheduling and drafting replies

Liam Hale McCarty · Answer

@matthias_strafinger I’ve always been frustrated with how opaque email providers are in terms of whether your emails are delivered, marked as spam, etc. Do you use any tools that are especially helpful at measuring (or estimating) that sort of thing?

Liam Hale McCarty · Answer

@simon_s_j Yes this would be great. All messages signed by the user's key. There is actually a way to do this (S/MIME certificates) but it's not the default and a real pain to set up. Gmail for example only enables it for enterprise accounts and even then there are a bunch of annoying setup steps.

🧠🌪️ Brainstorm! What’s one thing that would make email way better?

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