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.

Comments

No, please. No.

[Bloodwine77]

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?!

Re:No, please. No.

[tgl]

Yup, my reaction exactly. Whoever wrote this tool completely failed to get email. It's not IM, and that is not a bug.

Re:How Many Ways Can This Be Used

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Oh. Look who isn't home.

"require you to allow access to your email"

[farnsworth]

I am kind of astounded at how easily people give away access to their email accounts, no matter how harmless the intent of the email is. I got swamped by invites from facebook when several of my friends gave it access to their address books. Now that's just annoying, but is this guy's security up to the same level as gmail's? I tend to doubt it...

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?