Comment by chany2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chany2 | Hacker News Reader

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Email is not broken. The usage of email is however mishandled.

- Overload of messages

- Email Search / Discovery

- Finding important content

- Unnecessary CCs

- Major contents still live in emails

- Go-to place for everything; filtering important vs non-important

@byoung2, I think you reference a critical problem with email as I listed above. Sorting emails by "Actionable Categorization" by both sender and recipient.

Getting hold of the most important information asap without re-reading the content.

Currently, I am hacking with an idea on Hashtags for Important Email.

- Sender can write hashtag inside contents of the emails to group them appropriately for the recipient.

- Multiple users using hashtag help group important content together; leading to a Sharepoint for Email.

- Long email threads would be summarize to get the most relevant information possible.

Love to get your feedback @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6948659

Sounds interesting...I'll take a look at the other thread. I like the idea of hashtags for flexible categorization, but I think we need to go further, e.g. now I can see all #startup #article emails my coworker sent me, or all #vacation #photo emails from my college roommate who travels for a living, but do I really have to click into each email to get the link to each article or image attachment? Can't there be something that lets me choose hashtags:#vacation #photo,sender:John Doe and returns a CoverFlow type gallery of all the images, with the text of the emails as captions? Or hashtags:#startup #article to get a Flipboard type personalized magazine made up of the formatted text of all of the articles found.

I put your idea into consideration. See Image#3 at http://garyyauchan.com/sharepoint-for-emails/ . I definitely see the need only if this new Important-Email-Inbox on my app becomes very abundant with content. Then the need to filter becomes important.

There are two things I want to stay away from at that moment.

1) Calling this app I am developing as a "New Inbox", I think it would give the idea there is another source for their incoming mails. The idea is you hashtag ONLY IMPORTANT EMAILS to set yourself as a reminder, etc...

2) I would also like to avoid the Search / Filtering feature - which leads back down to the road of Gmail's Search. One of the cases for developing this app is because Search is not intelligent enough when there is a massive volume of emails.

Also I am going to re-think the idea of Flipboard as the new UI medium to become the differentiator to other email apps. Great feedback btw!

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