Needle and Haystack in the Inbox

Needle and Haystack in the Inbox

This entry was originally at http://kingsley.blog-city.com/read/49037.htm

How many times have you had this problem :

It’s difficult to make out what the message was really about. I have conversations like this in my inbox which run to 6-7 emails. The problem is especially acute while checking a web-email account over a dial up account. When I need to locate one email which contains some important info, I pretty much have to go through the entire list. One solution to this is to have message previews, where the first part of the message is displayed after the subject. But there are issues with that - often, the beginning part of a message is just “Dear so-and-so”. Search works, but is too much of a stretch for what is simply an information recall task.

Solution: The subject line of an email should be made editable. The edited subject line could carry an icon that denotes it was edited, and the original subject line in brackets. Like this:

This way, the email is labelled by the receiver in a way that makes sense to her/him. Replies to such mails should carry the unedited subject line, so the sender understands the context.

Applications : Primarily in web-email applications, where opening each email to find what you want is not practical.

Note: I’d mentioned this idea to Divi a while back. Today, while she was going through her inbox to find an email, she thought about it and commented here. I had kindof forgotten about it, but the fact that she remembered it when she did makes me think it has serious merit. Thanks Div, for reminding me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2003 at 1:12 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.