Slashdot Mirror
New Tool Shows Would-Be Emailers If You're Swamped
alphadogg writes "A Georgia Tech researcher is taking aim at email overload with a new tool that shows people thinking about messaging you just how swamped your Gmail account is, in real time. Assistant Professor of Computing Eric Gilbert's research project, taking the form of the freely available 'Courteous.ly' service, which does require you to allow access to your email account (initially the service only works with Gmail). 'Courteous.ly helps manage expectations and lets people choose to send mail when it's best for you,' he says." This sounds like an ugly thing to game, though -- it seems like a good way to keep score in a mailbombing.
In way that were unintended?
I think not...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The beauty of email is you can determine when to reply to a message or send correspondence. Compared to talking on the phone, email is less stressful, especially if you are doing support.
This tool would make it where people could say, "Why haven't you responded to me? You don't look like you have a lot of other emails coming in so I am sure you read my message".
I do not know if I am alone, but I refuse to ever let my email client send those email-has-been-read notifiers to let the sender know I got the email. People do not know if you got their letter/bill/request/mailer in your postal mail box, and people do not know if you have listened to your voicemail or how full your voicemail box. Why the heck should I give them insight into my email inbox?!
CONSENT DOCUMENT FOR ENROLLING ADULT PARTICIPANTS IN A RESEARCH STUDY Georgia Institute of Technology, Project Title: courteous.ly
Investigators: Eric Gilbert, Ph.D.
Protocol and Consent Title: H11133
You are being asked to be a volunteer in a research study.
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to understand if exposing hidden aspects of social media makes the media better. We also want to investigate whether courteous.ly makes an impact on the overall amount of email participants receive. We will enroll as many people as come to our site in this study. In addition to providing a useful tool, we also may contact participants for future email studies. Whether you choose to participate in a future study is up to you at that time. By default, you will be opted out of future studies. Your future decision will not affect your use of courteous.ly now.
Participants in this study must have a Gmail account and must be 18 years or older to participate.
If you choose to give courteous.ly access to your Gmail account, the application will compute a measure of your email load. It does this by counting the number of messages in your email folders. The values for your email load can only be "light," "normal," or "high." courteous.ly will generate a unique url for you to put in your email signature. The intent of the custom url is for your email contacts to be able to see your real-time email load. The sign-up and configuration process should take you about 10 minutes.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
this tool is enabler - any potential attacker would be easily able to establish patterns of one's behaviour and than use the opportunity when one is not e-present to impose and take time to work through all logins and whatnot one has.
.Play.Open.Minded.
This isn't the right thing for me, because I don't receive very much email. Yet I am tremendously pleased that they are looking for ways to prioritize email that puts the sender in the loop, because I've run into far too many situations where something gets lost because I'm not prepared to deal with it at the moment. (Example: I don't do personal email while at work and I don't deal with work email at home, so don't send ask for an appointment at 6 pm expecting a reply before you go to bed.)
Yes there are filters and there is communicating expectations to friends/colleagues. But the former doesn't allow for the sender to use their discretion and automated email systems have no way of knowing when is a good time of day to tell me that my library books are overdue or send the receipt for my latest purchase.
Do people expect immediate replies to emails? I've always understood it to be for time-insensitive matters and any time I need a quick answer I call or IM/text If I can't talk to them in person.
I could see this service being useful in managing expectations of when a response will be sent. Although, I think it would only be good for when you're sending emails that need a timely reply to people you only communicate with through email. That situation doesn't seem to be all that common in my experience.
Knowledge Brings Fear
As an aside, what the hell happened to slashdot? A couple days ago it was its usual tolerable self, but now I have the most garish ads for Adobe authoring tools and groupon and nonsensical cloud virtualization things, and it's slow as hell. I am happy to co-exist with ads if they pay the bills, but these ads kind of ruin everything. Is slashdot on its last legs?
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante (x) social
approach to [controlling your inbox]. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) Google will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) I don't want the [university] reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
So do the busy messages go something like this?
dbIII@email.address is with busy meeting HR 12/20 still employed 12%
The 'Dabangg' achievements have resulted in supplementary break and get together in her roles. In 'Kick' her subsequently with her mentor Salman, the good-looking lass will be like much more display space. Yeah, there's absolutely much supplementary scope for me in 'Kick' than 'Dabangg'. And I am disappearing to construct the best of it," says the ecstatic Sonakshi.
The only people with whom I would comfortably share the status of my inbox are people I know and like well enough to prioritize their messages over others, and are too few to swamp my inbox by themselves.
And even then, I like controlling how soon an answer is expected from me. The whole point of email over IM, to me, is to have time to form a response or even get other stuff out of the way before reading it.
So anyone who is "courteous" will see that I have "high" number of unread emails and make the decision not to email me. People who aren't "courteous" either won't look, or won't care and just go ahead and send me email. Given that it's the "courteous" people with whom I most want to have contact, this is a sure-fire way to make email worse.
The best thing about email is that it's possible to let it sit unread until such a time when you can deal with it. What does this guy think will happen? My parents see I have a lot of unread email and decide not to email me, they then periodically check over the next month, but my unread messages never drop below "high" because they only ever check at a certain time of day and I only ever clear out my unread messages at a certain time of day. He wants to create a bastard chimera that has the worst parts of instant messaging and email.
Here's my idea -- "A new tool that helps to bypass swamped email accounts, by immediately presenting the message to the recipient in a pop-up box. The service does require you to install a small local client which provides instant access to messages. Helps cut down on clogged email boxes; if you don't have time for the message, close the popup and it goes away forever."
Sounds great!
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Was I the only one who read the headline as:
New Tool-Shows Would Be Emailers If You're Swamped
and thought the submission was about Internet connected set-top boxes allowing Power-tool infomercials to detect if you're already buried under a ton of messages and then send you a few more emails hoping that you'll click them accidentally?
(Kind of like how Google ads can be camouflaged to look like part of the site's content to snag a few accidental clicks...)
My inbox has a few peaks in traffic depending on who's awake in what timezone, but the average busy time is roughly 2am-7pm monday-friday in my local timezone. If you find a quiet time to email me the chances are it's when i'm asleep or otherwise not at the computer. When I get back to the computer again i'll have your email + half a day's worth of other email waiting for me.
Just because you emailed me in a quiet time doesn't mean i'm attending to my email during that time (even if it happens to be in the middle of a sunday afternoon), and doesn't mean that when I get back to my email that yours won't be one of a thousand waiting for me.
To successfully negotiate the above would require the service knowing when i'm attending to my emails, not just when i'm receiving them. That's more information than I'd like to be known by some remote entity that has access to my mailbox.
All this would do is lead to people expecting a response as soon as their e-mail was read and/or when your box showed no e-mails waiting and them getting angry when they don't get it.
People tend to have an attitude of "My problem is the most important in the world," and "If you aren't doing something RIGHT NOW that looks really important you should be working on it." Something like this would only make that tendency worse. I'd have people coming down saying "Why haven't you responded to my e-mail, the thing shows you have no unread messages," as though when I click a message I am able to drop everything and immediately respond.
As you say, the brilliance of e-mail is that it is non-realtime. You send a message, I send back a response when I can. All things like this would do is encourage people to think of e-mail as something that should demand a response at once.
Also all this would really do is encourage me to not open e-mail until I think I am ready to deal with them. It would be in my interests to keep my backlog "full" so that people would leave me alone and allow me to solve problems. Fine, but that means I can't read what it coming in and prioritize. Right now I can see something and say "This is important, and easy to solve, so I should shelve what I'm doing and go take care of it." I wouldn't be able to do that if I had to keep messages unread just so people weren't harassing me to do things since I "wasn't busy."
Personally I try to keep my inbox with no unread messages, because all unread messages means is I don't know about something. However that doesn't relate to my workload at all. Some days, 40 messages could come in all for areas I don't deal with so even if all 40 were unread I could very well be available for immediate action if needed. Others (like today) something critical is down and I'm spending all day working on it so even though I'm reading e-mail, I can't go and help with anything else.
Most people either keep clean inboxes or messy ones. So if you are one that always has hundreds of emails in your inbox it will perpetually show you are "swamped".
I don't think this algoritm would give a good insight in how I use email myself.
I subscribe to quite a few newsletters, and as such, my email inbox is almost always filled. Most of them I directly archive (they get auto-tagged when appearing in my inbox; so they're easier to file), and some I leave in my inbox for later browsing/reference. Also other important emails I leave in my inbox (yes, I should be filing those too) when I read them, and mark them unread so I know I still have to do something with it.
This behaviour would lead the sender to believe I'm always swamped.
And to be honest: I think this is a solution trying to be found for a problem that doesn't really exist.
If you want someone to read your email, make sure to have a proper subject-title, or use the in-office urgency-tags.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
It's EMAIL, not IM, not a phone call. You send it when you want. The recipient reads it and replies when he gets around to it. How does "when it's best for you" make any sense in this context? The only vaguely sensible use I can think is if you suspect an email box has been bombed; or he just isn't checking his email at all. But if it's time sensitive, use the phone don't screw around with this.
If I'm busy, I still have to deal with all the issues.
And people still have things they need me to do. The fact that I'm busy doesn't change that, and if people used this system it would just make it seem like I was less busy than I was, while the fires I needed to put out continued to smolder.
Gmail has a "priority inbox" which seems like the rational answer: handle the important tasks first.
If your job is answering emails!!! If you are swamped with work, you might just have 1 unread email in your inbox. Then again, it just might be a spam that slipped past the spam filter (i hear it even happens with google).
Still, I hope to God that my inbox stats are never used as the measure of my work load!
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
Hmm, there isn't exactly too much email, it's about what people expect of different type of email.
Gmail(&others) has "mark as read", so we have escaped read receipts because that isn't even correlated to if the email has even been read. I let people send me whatever they want. Half the time I crusade about not getting enough info since I am on lead for documenting stuff. So send me stuff! It's easy to just park it as "document later."
As for the status, I will encourage people to use the Gmail (or other?) Chat Status as their dynamic status marker. Put anything you want there! Baseball results, coordinate pizza parties, monday blues. That means it doesn't send an email as a "status".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Anyone remember finger? I never liked it, because I don't want anyone knowing the status of my email, not even way back then. "Georgia Tech researcher" my ass; this is a tech historian/preservationist.
I8-D
I'm am not going to sign up to some service which monitors my email load for me ... I don't trust it, and I don't trust that it won't become a security risk.
And, really, I've more or less decided I don't trust any URL ending in .ly -- between not having any idea of what's on the other end of most of those link shorteners (goatse anyone), and not really trusting Lybia in any way, I don't trust that some shenanigans aren't happening or couldn't be made to happen.
I'm sure as hell not trusting some third party with access to my email. Do they really think a whole lot of people are going to do that? Or is everyone ready to do such things and trust this site?
I realize I'm probably on the paranoid end of such things, but I just can't fathom signing up for something like this. You can't have my banking password, either.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If I were actually fairly busy, I'd love to have this sort of thing available to the family members who forward me crap. Funny stuff, interesting stuff, but really just pointless, time-wasting stuff. I'm really tempted to make a policy that if you don't have anything useful to add to the forwarded message, it gets flagged as spam -- I care what you have to say, but I don't care about the funny cat video you found.
I have to imagine that people would think twice before sending me People of Wall-Mart (with all the images attached to the email, naturally, rather than just fucking linking to it) if they knew my inbox had a few thousand unread messages.
But even this use would backfire in about the same way -- as soon as I actually get my inbox cleared, I can expect a hundred new useless messages from people who were waiting for the best time to send low-priority crap. And I tend to send email-has-been-read notifiers, but conditionally.
The whole point of email over IM or chat is that it's asynchronous. Not that you couldn't have all of them be asynchronous, which is one reason I was excited about Wave -- you could have the discussion be exactly as synchronous as it needed to be. Still, there's IM, phones, and finding me in person for when you need an answer RIGHT NOW -- but don't abuse it; the phone is on vibrate specifically to allow me to ignore a call if I don't feel like it's urgent. Email gets answered in the same way that tickets get closed -- as a break from other work, or when I run out of things to do, or during some time I've deliberately set aside for that.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Why would I want to use this, on either end of the equation? I send email for things that are not time-critical, or that I would like to have a documented record of. In the event of a somewhat time critical issue I will opt for IM, or if genuinely time critical, a phone call. We have different systems in place to serve different purposes.
Especially if you live in Tenn.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/06/tennessee_makes.html
I have tons of unread email, most people might too, but I'm free.
...to display a static HTML page that says I'm swamped.
What an great idea how do we get it into the smtp protocol i dont want access to 3rd parties infecting my inbox thats not going to fly well with me however I would love to have the ability to turn on a busy signal until a later time
Because we really want people to know how busy/not busy we are..