In Search of the Perfect Email Software

Email is as much a fact of life nowadays for most knowledge workers as opening the morning snail mail used to be. I don't know about you, but just dealing with email has lately gotten to be a time-sink and chore I don't look forward to. Anyone who can improve this situation will certainly do a lot of people a lot of good, and that's a good example of engineering ethics in my book. Part of the problem, no doubt, is my high expectations for what should happen to my email. In what follows I'm probably going to show off my ignorance and prejudices in a good strong light, but it may be worth it if something close to my ideal software ever turns up.

I'm one of those people who takes seriously the thought that months or years later after I get an email message I care about, I should be able to find it any time my computer is on, whether it's connected to the network or not. This means (unless I'm blessed with a total-recall photographic memory, which I'm not) that important emails (that is, ones I decide to keep) need to be sorted somehow and should physically reside somewhere on my laptop for access without a network connection.

Back when email was a novelty and getting three emails a day was a comparative blizzard, these requirements were easy to meet. Sorting email into files on my computer took maybe thirty seconds. But nowadays, if I skip reading my email for only twenty-four hours, when I check it again there's easily fifty or a hundred of the little jewels, only a few of which I am interested in. The rest is everything from notices about worker-training courses I don't need to offers to help princes get their money out of countries I've never been to, and worse.

I used to pride myself on doing what the older generation called "clearing my correspondence," which meant that every day, I checked out every email (at least by its source and subject line), either threw it away or filed it somewhere using the software filing routine, and got the inbox down to either zero or the two or three emails I hadn't decided what to do with yet. Filing consists of negotiating one of those multiple-level popup menus, most layers of which have so many items that I have to use the scroll function, which on no email program I've tried has a scroll bar, so I have to slide to the bottom of the visible list and stand on the mouse till the desired category comes into view, at which point I select it and sometimes have to do the whole thing over again at the next menu level (I have files within files within files, sort of like wheels within wheels). This means that filing a single email sometimes takes twenty or thirty seconds, and oh! the joy when the very next email in the list turns out to belong right where the previous one went—another thirty or forty seconds, because this time I'm mad and slip up and select "Nutcases" instead of "NosferatuTheorists"—well, in that case it wouldn't matter, but you know what I mean. So after a half hour or forty minutes of this kind of thing, I struggle back up the Sisyphean slope to a mostly empty email box, only to turn my back for a few hours and face a door-filling pile flooding in again, metaphorically speaking.

So how would the perfect email software help me? For one thing, I could use it on either of my two main computers. The way it is now, I can have part of what I want—files of old email without Internet access—only on my office computer. For some obscure reason known only to IT professionals, I can send emails with a computer-resident software like Thunderbird (or the old Eudora) only if I'm physically plugged in to my university server. If I'm anywhere else, I have to log into the internet-based software program the University runs (it's like Gmail in that respect), send an email, and copy it to myself in order to have a permanent copy that I'll later download into my Thunderbird resident software, but that adds to my already tedious task of sorting email.

Returning to the elusive purpose of describing the perfect email software, I'd better resort to bullets if I'm going to finish at all. It would:

--- Store all the email I decide to keep in an intuitive, use-frequency-based filing system (one that makes the more frequently used files easier to get at, and saves the four-layer menus for ones I access every three years or so)
--- Be accessible anywhere in the world, for sending as well as receiving, and would leave a permanent sorted record of sent emails on my machine as well as on some server somewhere
--- Would automatically figure out the procedure for getting off an email list and write the necessary messages once I put a sample undesirable email into a "get rid of this junk" file
--- Would use some kind of quasi-intelligent processing to figure out which email sources I'm really interested in and which I'm not, and would rank order these within some kind of time-based presentation, that is, most recent interesting ones first, older interesting ones later, and so on.
--- Would give me access to all emails I decided to keep, going back to the dawn of time (email time, anyway) with or without internet access

There, that'll do for starters. So far, I haven't been able to find the perfect software. None of the server-based systems will do (Gmail, Microsoft Outlook) because you have to be hooked to the Internet to find old emails, and some of them throw away old ones anyway, drat it. But the resident programs that store mail physically on your laptop can't be used to send mail except from the one server. That seems like a simple thing to fix, but maybe fixing it would violate the computer-science equivalent of the law of gravity, or something. And moving categories around so that the most frequently used folders are easy to get at doesn't sound hard. Note that I don't want to do it—I want the software to do it for me. Sure, I could reorganize my own files, but that would add a three-hour task every few months to my already excessive time spent on computer housekeeping, and I thought time saving was what software was all about. Hah.

And don't tell me to get a new email account to cut down on the junk email, either. That way folly lies, because it just trades a few months of quiet now for the heinous duty of checking more than one email account—forever. No, thanks.

Any suggestions?

Sources: If you want to know what "Sisyphean" means, check out the back story on the founder of Corinth at http://www.mythweb.com/encyc/entries/sisyphus.html—he was quite a tricky guy, it turns out, and well deserved the punishment meted to him by the gods. I think some of his descendants must be writing spamware today.