Email 2.0
Your Personal, Trustworthy & Automatic Email Assistant
Imagine the world where your email inbox is only filled with important emails. No more spam and useless notifications. When every email is organised, has a label and is beautifully presented. To make this happen, your email needs an assistant.
Below are the screens that tell the story of how email could be re-imagined.
Organizing Wild West…
The biggest problem with emails is that it is like Wild West. It’s rough, unorganized, without rules and hasn’t really improved in the past 10 years.
I’m here to tell you that it is not your fault, but rather your email provider’s fault. Emails shouldn’t be organized by humans. No, it should be sorted out by algorithms that know the difference between your co-worker and Spam.
The ideas below are inspired by my own personal experience, answers from Quora and from many articles about how to manage your emails.
From being the pain, to an assistant
Any person who uses email can tell you that they have too many emails. Please don’t blame yourself, blame your email provider.
So, the questions is: how do you categorize and group all of these emails? (Some pointless and some very important.) The simple answer is by using algorithms that analyse every email send & received, the long answer is below…
Sorting out the senders…
Every sender should be sorted out by their importance. I organized them into three degrees: 1st degree connections (Family, Friends, Co-workers); 2nd degree connections (Family, Friends, Co-workers and payments); and lastly, 3rd degree connections (Unknown, spam, notifications, newsletters etc.)
The degree will be determined on the interactions between you and another person. These would include the frequency of emails exchanged, the shared history and the social network connections.
Once the senders are sorted out, the platform will have a basic filter for every email. Every sender is then automatically sorted out into a degree (and updated constantly). For example, if you are working on a project with someone and you frequently email each other, that person will be considered as a 1st degree connection. However, after the project ends, the frequency of emails exchanged between you and another person might decline. If it does, he will be moved to a 2nd degree connection. For every person, connections are going to be different and kept privately (it will only be shown to you). This would be the first tool of sorting out the emails based on their importance.
Groups.
The second stage of the algorithm would be to sort out people into specific groups. Every group would be created automatically and updated without your help. Groups would be based on your social network (LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter), email exchanges and other statistics.
You would be able to change groups and move people around. However, the first stage and hardest stage would be done automatically.
Email’s Content
The third process to determine the importance of email would be by analysing email’s content. Every email would go through a four step process:
- Firstly, the platform would check to see if the email is a reply, CC’d, forwarded or flagged to determine its importance. If it is, it would be viewed as important.
2. Secondly, it would check if the email contains any attachments. If it does, it would be viewed as important.
3. After that, it would search for any words that might be associated with unimportant emails (e.g. deal, updates, notification, announcements, new, alert, promote, newsletter etc.). It would count the percentage of the negative words and determine if the email is important or not. For example, if the email consist of 5% or more of negative words the email would be viewed as spam or irrelevant.
4. Next, it would check your email history. It would check your engagement level with similar emails in the past. If the previous email were not engaged (opened etc.), the new email would be viewed as unimportant.
Joining the pieces together
By collecting so much information about senders and emails, the platform would be able to sort out the emails automatically by importance and by groups. The emails would be presented perfectly without much clutter.
The email 2.0 would show you a whole email from the home screen, no more clicking, just scrolling. This would not work with a current email providers because of spam and irrelevant emails. However, because email 2.0 would sort out the emails, only relevant emails would be shown.
The new email would be less cluttered and more content-centric. Each attachment would have a small preview icon depending on the file (e.g. Photoshop would have a PSD file icon, whereas, a photo would have a small thumbnail of the photo). You would also be able to view and download the attachments directly from the home screen.
Emails could still be better
At first I thought that I will just improve the sorting bit of emails, but after spending some time analyzing emails I decided to make other changes as well.
Searching…
Gmail probably has the best search engine currently. However, it is still impossible to find emails. The new search engine would not only search both the emails and attachments, but also would group emails.
Search would be divided into four categories. A basic email search (current search); search separated into groups, search within files and search separated by people.
Contact List — People
Currently, the contact list is pretty much useless (unless you invest a lot of time in it). The email 2.0 would update your contact list automatically - it would be more like a social network. Your email address would also connect with other social networks and would provide a more detailed view of you (you can already do that by using third party platforms).
Additional features…
The new email would also come with new features: ability to schedule an email; ability to rename subject; a pop up to unsubscribe; a pop up for activation emails; delivered, unread and read buttons; for multiple emails a whatsapp like conversation; better integration with the cloud storage services; and better integration with Maps.
Add one more thing
I think this can and will be created in the next 5 years. The technology is nearly there, and emails had been a hot topic for a couple of years now. Personally, I hope that a startup could be the face of email 2.0, not the big four. That’s all, thank you for reading this!
Marius Spencer is a UI & UX senior freelance designer. For more information please visit kingscovers.co.uk or Behance
