Tag: email

mail2blog

i can post in html with my email client to my blog (through a special email-address linked to it), selecting multiple categories.(by specifying them in a X-Categories custom mail header). Attachments to the email are automatically placed in the right location.

interesting. of course, such functionality is crucial for moblogging too. the moment of release is coming nearer, but there is a place to play in the meantime.

Email productivity

I’d gladly pay for a product like inbox buddy that makes my thunderbird / mozilla calendar experience more productive. Scott, how about a port?
2005-03-27: If you are using thunderbird and participate in a lot of threaded conversations, do yourself a favor and install quote colors. You will scan your emails that much faster.
2008-02-27:

Here are concrete tips that can help eliminate—as a start—compulsive inboxing during the evenings and weekends. Treat all of them as short experiments and customize.

  • “Batch” email at set times.
  • Send and read email at different times.
  • Don’t scan email if you can’t immediately fix problems encountered.
  • Don’t before i forget people during off-hours.
  • Set rules for email-to-phone escalation.
  • Before writing an email, ask: “what problem am I trying to solve?”
  • Learn to make suggestions instead of asking questions.

oy. I so need to internalize those. I am terrible at email productivity
2014-04-25: I love productivity hacks like that.

We all get a ton of email. In most cases replying politely can be demanding. But it shouldn’t be. When someone sends you an email with “VSRE” in the subject or the body, he/she is expecting a very short answer.

subtle communications

wanted to send an email today, and got back “exceeded storage allocation”. a clear indication that this person isn’t checking her inbox very often. what to do? calling is so 80s, not to mention that i consider calls increasingly rude. sms is the email of the disconnected, and only allows 255 characters. postal mail, finally, is far too serious and cumbersome these days. (i send maybe one postal mail in 6 months, only if i have too. its just such a hassle) why o why don’t people use efficient means of communication..

marrying email & weblogs

a lot of productivity stems from the use of email. likewise, a lot of productivity is lost by having to deal with massive email archives. plus, email tends to be unmanageable for most people once it leaves their inbox and disappears into some email folder (or more likely, is deleted)

as john udell discusses in NNTP, IMAP, And The Semantic Web, email needs to be better integrated with other technologies. i have a few ideas how this might be done with weblogs.

  • mail-to-weblog gateway: converts mails to weblog posts, and replies to comments by analyzing the message id of the email
  • map email addresses of a mailing list with user accounts of a weblog
  • add a X-Topic header to email to facilitate integration into a weblog
  • assign categories to imap folders -> match with weblog
  • attach discussion on imap folder / imap messages

the goal should be to make most email traffic google searchable. google has become so important that if your content is not in google, it could as well not exist. this is exaggerated, but has a point.

Email at 30

email was invented by a mr. tomlinson, without him giving much thought to the matter, at the time.

digitalmuse had this to say, and i found it fitting:

hmmm, e-mail is older than I am (26yrs). and I measure myself through the things I’ve seen. I remember Ronald Reagan as a very young child. I recall my parent’s last throes of back-to-the-land/cold-war self-sufficiency. I was astounded as the first Space Shuttle launch took us around the earth and flew us back home on wings. I was glued to the TVs when the Challenger exploded. I was there when faxes were pasted hourly on the walls of Boston’s chinatown as Tiananmen square unfolded.

I lost friends in an act of terrorism that the world had never seen before, or even believed possible outside of cheap paperback fiction.

I have done all these things at a distance, I have made friends and effected change on continents that I may never visit.

I have dipped my toes in the greater waters of mankind.

All this in less than 30 years.

How will my children look back when they are my age?

Will they remember a world before the arrival of the metaverse that allows them to interact around the world, regardless of language, race, time, or class?

Will they look back with sepia-toned memories of the good-old days before corporate structures replaced government?

Might they think of us with scorn, as those who poisoned the earth and water that they inherited?

Or will they think of us as the generation that first tasted this fruit of true communication, and were alternately torn and brought together by it.

pioneers in a digital age where the hot metal was still fluid and a malleable medium, filling gaps and voids in the mold of society.

what will someone say about us in 30 years.

what do we want to leave as our legacy for our children,

food for thought.