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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.
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.
Oh. Look who isn't home.
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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.
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.
Hey, you're only being asked to open your email account to a domain registered in Libya, it's not like anything bad could happen...
crap, I think I broke my own sarcasm meter.
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