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Comment by diego | Hacker News Reader

This is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. In the meantime, real unsexy problems are ignored. It reminds me of this post:

http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-the-fuck

I meet too many startups in SV working on questionable incremental improvements to social networks and communication tools. Not enough people think about low-hanging fruit problems that affect the quality of life of millions of people.

I'm trying to compile a list of some problems in that category, and I'll share it at some point.

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I think it is a real problem when you don't own your email or its contents. I would love if something like this was officially supported by all the big players.

Problem is finding stuff in your inbox. This helps with the noise problem from emails that will never be relevant again.

Ok, it's not a problem that doesn't exist. It exists, but it's insignificant.

I think that working on the "email noise problem" when you could be building a profitable business helping people prevent or cure life-threatening conditions is a terrible use of brainpower.

Insignificant to you, maybe. But this is a big problem to me. Preventing life-threatening diseases is insanely important and I don't want to discourage anyone from working on it, but it doesn't mean other problems shouldn't be solved or worked on.

If you help doctors, researchers, and others working on life-threatening problems get relevant information they need faster, then you are indirectly helping with these efforts. Not everyone can be the person on the frontline of these critical efforts, but if you can improve their working conditions then surely you've helped out a bit?

These are precisely the people that should not be having emails deleted automatically. "Wait which kidney was I supposed to remove" let me check that email... oops

This idea would only be good for spam "buy now before its too late" type emails (ie non-important information) which is not a problem that really needs solving.

Yeah, you're right. I was responding to the general problem of finding stuff in your inbox as restated by others - not the suggestion of self-destructing email. Sorry I was unclear.

But a meeting invite from the past may contain other information I want in the future. Deciding what is useful to keep and what can be safely trashed is a very tricky (if not impossible) problem.

As for generic expiry of individual emails, Lotus Notes has been doing that for years and years. It doesn't provide expiry of emails that go outside of Notes, but that is not what it's trying to solve. Internal data retention policies become much easier to handle if it's enforced by every user's mail client.

Isn't that what the delete button does?

I actually agree with you, I wrote the post not to work on it, but give context and inspire the giants gmail, microsoft and others to do something about it.

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