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Summary of the Reading
This paper investigates automation with regards to emails. A large portion of many people’s days is devoted to sifting through the hundreds of emails that they receive. Many of the tasks that go into this might be automatable. This paper not only looks at how different tasks related to dealing with emails can be automated, but it also investigates the opportunities for automation in popular email clients.
The paper found that many people wanted to automate tasks that required more data from emails. Users wanted access to things like the status of the email (pending, done, etc.), the deadline, the topic, the priority, and many other data points. The paper also noted that people would like to be able to aggregate responses to emails to more easily see things like group responses to an event. Having access to these features would allow for users to better manage their inboxes. Some current solutions exist to these issues, but some automation is held back by limitations in email clients.
Reflections and Connections
I love the idea of this paper. I know that ever since I got my email account, I have loved playing around with the automation features. When I was a kid it was more because it was just fun to do, but now that I’m an adult and receive many more emails than back then (and many more than I would like), I need automation to be able to deal with all of the emails that I get on a daily basis.
I use Gmail and I think that it offers many good features for automating my inbox. Most importantly, Gmail will automatically sort mail into a few major categories, like Primary, Social, and Promotions. This by itself is extremely helpful. Most of the important emails get sent to the Primary tab so I can see them and deal with them more easily. The Promotions tab is also great at aggregating a lot of the emails I get from companies about products or sales or whatever that I don’t care about most of the time. Gmail also allows users to make filters that will automatically do some action based on certain criteria about the email. I think both of these features are great. But, it could be so much more useful.
As the paper mentions, many people want to be able to see more data about emails. I agree. The filter feature in Gmail is great, but you can only filter based on very simple things like the subject of the email, the date it was sent, or the sender. You can’t create filters for more useful things like tasks that are listed in the email, whether or not the email is an update to a project that you got other emails about, or the due date of tasks in the email. Like the paper says, these would be useful features. I would love a system that allowed me to create filters based on deeper data about my emails. Hopefully Gmail can take some notes from this paper and implement new ways to filter emails.
Questions
- What piece of data would you like to be able to sort emails by?
- What is your biggest problem with your current email client? Does it lack automation features?
- What parts of email management can we not automate? Why? Could we see automatic replies to long emails in the future?
From my previous internships, I have learned to swear by email. Despite working with multiple teams in an Agile based setup, changes and late enhancements can be added just through emails. Since blame has been avoided through email chains, I would definitely sort by regular expressions. This would allow a more granular search using Story information, like Story ID. I definitely don’t like the restrictions set by my Google email client. It provides certain automation for auto sorting. I would prefer python-based automation to create summarizations of email chains. I would also prefer to create an RSS feed directly from the source of the email.