In spite of 35 years of incremental enhancement, can email benefit from our taking a few moments to consider strategic opportunities that are being missed? Given a small amount of careful focus, can we make significant improvements?
This is not a question of replacing email. In spite of periodic claims that email is dying, a pure replacement of the current service is not likely and not in scope. Rather, can we identify small number of strategic improvements that seem feasible and exciting?
Perhaps the most recent example was the addition of multi-media content to the previously text-only email service. What was most astonishing about this accomplishment is that it was done as an overlay, without disturbing the existing email operational infrastructure and without requiring adoption by anyone other than the end-user participants. A few years of development, and a few years of adoption, and then we have trouble imaging email without it.
Are there other, similar opportunities?
I am hoping that we can put forward idea, find a few that resonate with others, and formulate a way forward to make them happen. Typically, it's easy to come up with interesting ideas. What is difficult is coming up with ones that are practical and that get others to join in.
/d
An idea that's seemed poised to take off for a while is to ease unsubscribing & list preferences, using List-Unsubscribe and other headers.
The biggest barrier is that spammers could easily include those headers, too, leading to easy phishing or other badness. I've had a few ideas for adding authentication & reputation into the mix, and Hotmail has implemented something not entirely unlike that, but apparently nobody likes it.
Seems like this could be a good topic for dicussion -- and expand into the larger issue of embedding user preference options into email, giving users control over the messages they receive without leaving the client.
Or, maybe this is moot now that many mail clients can handle RSS feeds?
Posted by: J.D. | June 04, 2008 at 12:21 PM