What if some emails had an expiration date? After the expiration date, both mailbox providers and mail clients (MUAs) could do smart things with the message instead of just leaving it there.
This could be implemented with a simple "X-Expires" header.
This would be useful for automated reports and daily log files that are sent out on a recurring basis. It's also great for news and stock alerts, weekly newsletters and more.
This is a win for consumers because they have less mailbox clutter. Messages that are no longer relevant wouldn't hang around in the Inbox. Depending on implementation, messages that have expired could be flagged with a visual indicator, moved to a special folder or just deleted. Users should be able to override this behavior if they don't want messages to expire automatically.
This is a win for mailbox providers and ISPs because they save disk space and bandwidth. IT administrators should love this because it will keep Outlook PST files smaller and help people stay under quota.
This is a win for marketers because they will get fewer spam complaints and higher open and clickthrough rates. If a user see lots of mail piled up, they are more likely to select all of them and delete them without reading them or even worse, mark them all as spam. If there is just one or two messages that are recent and relevant, they are more likely to be opened and acted upon and less likely to mark them as spam.
Josh, I think this is a great idea. The overloaded inbox is perhaps email's biggest challenge. Would the headers be customizable by individual? In other words, would it be possible for me on opting in to an email to select after how many days, weeks I wanted the email to expire - and then have that inserted into the xpire header you mentioned?
Posted by: Loren McDonald | June 05, 2008 at 01:31 AM
Technically this is no problem. The actual expiration date is set by the sender, and they could personalize this for each user if they wanted to, just like most senders personalize the unsubscribe link for each user.
I think its more widely useful for things where the sender knows how long its valid. For example, an email about a Mother's Day sale could expire the day after Mother's Day. A weekly email newsletter might expire on the day the next newsletter will be sent. etc.
Posted by: Joshua Baer | June 05, 2008 at 06:22 PM
Hi Josh,
Thanks for your reply to my comment on your OtherInbox blog. I guess we must have been thinking on the same wavelength!
I agree that the X-Expires header has value. In fact the idea of deleting expired email reminds me of (from what I've heard), AOL's "this is spam" feature, wherein after a certain amount of complaints, AOL is able to go in and move the emails in other users' inboxes into the junk folder.
However, I feel the user should be the one to assign an email its shelf life. A person might want to keep certain industry newsletters so they could search through them later for news tidbits (ie competitive information), while deleting others which they perceive has less long term value.
Either way I think a combination of both will help make the mess we call email a little easier to manage.
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FYI here's the comment I posted on the other blog:
I've always wanted a plugin I could use to mark email addreses of newsletters that I feel have a limited shelf life.
The plugin would let me set rules such as "Delete after X days" or "Delete after X days after opened".
That way I don't have to sort all my emails on senders and delete them every month to clean up my inbox.
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Posted by: Gregory | December 07, 2009 at 04:16 AM