Time to pay for email?

Guardian has an interesting article The end of free email.

Like calling an organisation or person, I have to pay the cost of the
phone call! Likewise for sending them a letter (with the exception of
organisations offering FREEPOST addresses). Perhaps we should do the
same for email, 1p per email externally to start with?

"One of the best ways to deal with externalities is to create a market. This means we start respecting other people's inbox as their own property, and stop dumping into it without consideration. We create a system that forces people to bear more of the costs of their actions."

Interesting to consider the options to try cut back on both unnecessary email and spam email. Having authenticated SMTP servers on a white list would make it much eaier to see who was actually emailing too.

Web unified HOME folder and email

Back in 2005 I had a great idea, only found time this evening to write about it due to the snow in UK :)

Essentially we have two folder hierarchies, HOME folder, and email Inbox etc when we only need one!

So currently I have in my HOME folder I have:
Documents
Music
Videos
Photos
Public
Deleted
Tosort

In my Email I have:
Inbox
Drafts
Sent
Deleted
Documents


Take the example of me quoting for some work. On a spreadsheet I calculate my costs, my fees and I email my total quote to client as my tender. Now in a conventional system I could not store that spreadsheet with the email. I need to keep two different directory structures.

So I'd like my email client to operate on the HOME folder, I even have "Tosort" which is basically an "Inbox" and of cause Deleted.

So this means we have:
Inbox
Drafts
Sent
Documents
Photos
Videos
Public
Deleted

This allows more flexibility, I can even save a document and photo in the same folder which contains my email about the same topic for future reference.

For true flexibility this unified HOME directory would be hosted on a server, so I can access from any of my netbooks, and weblogins.

Easy email unsend cancel design ;)

Pretty easy to unsend an email when it's not actually been sent yet.. mail client just needs to implement a 2min delay, giving you plenty of time to go into your Sent folder and click Cancel on it!

Why web forms are bad (compared to email)

Don't you just hate it when you click on the "email" link on someone's website and it takes you to a tiny web-form which only fits about 6 words per line, cramped into a small box? After struggling to write your message you invariably click "submit" and it says Error.. you click the "back" button optimistically and of cause the whole message is gone. Webmasters got overexcited and tried to run internet messaging through a web page, when really it should be left as standard email or IM.

Short run down of why web-forms are bad for messages:

• Tiny form boxes, pledgebank is a great example, limited to 7 words per line.
• Often arbitrary restrictions on the text that can be written. Lincolnshire NHS trust have a secret blocked character list including ",', and ; then they limit to 255 characters.
• Often fails to "Submit" and when you click back of cause it has lost all your text.
• Leaves me with no record in my Sent folder of what I've written.
• No way to forward the message I have sent to a friend, or another department at the organisation.
  

All these problems make it very difficult to send a website a message telling them one of their pages has broken links or typos etc. Web-forms can always be a secondary contact option, but email should always be the first option as it is the best. See Email 101 for tips on writing to the point.

Fix outlook to *not* top-post!

Came across this Microsoft page with the following tip to get rid of those annoying quoted copies of emails which get included when replying:

"Do not automatically include the original message

1. In the main Office Outlook 2007 window, on the Tools menu, click Options.
2. Click the Preferences tab, and then click E-Mail Options.
3. Under On replies and forwards, in the When replying to a message drop-down list, select Do not include original message."

Incorrect email from, envelope-sender and reply-to addresses

Companies seem to be getting worse at email these days. Now email is almost considered a shot in the dark, with either an invalid from, return-path and sender address, or one which which send any reply straight to /dev/null. And now some even bounce back saying there will be no response to emails and we should call a premium rate call centre number.

Take the example of this marketing email I got from Holiday Extras. The return address was agent@ukex11.pur3.net and the from address was . Reply to the email and you get a bounce straight back. They should have set them to customerrelations@holidayextras.com!

Some companies now insist on filing any "email" contact with them in a tiny web-form, which I don't think really is fair to really call email. This means we don't have a copy of the "email" in our "Sent" folder with the rest of our email, and we have no record that we have contacted the company though the tiny web-form, so when they don't reply we don't have a copy of what we sent them or any proof.

Often the web-forms will have bugs, like a 255 character limit, or a silly set of blocked characters which includes question marks and commas.

Got another one today saying "NOTE: This is an automatically generated email. Please do not reply to this email."... but when I email these companies I don't hide my email address.. The same when they call me from Withheld numbers..

So, any companies reading this.. switch back to standard email, and provide good customer service!