Are you quite happy with the email software you use? maybe you are, but I am not! Having used different applications for email I found most of them lack the intelligence to help me communicate efficiently and effectively, I am currently using Microsoft Office Outlook, and though it satisfies most of my needs, I think it needs major improvements so as are other Email applications,  In this post I will propose some thoughts about the future of email software as I dream of it and will elaborate on the way email software should consider the emotional aspect of communication which cannot be igonred. Email has been invented over 40 years ago, and yet most of people use it as a primary communication method, rather than using new technologies to communicate such as Web 2.0, using email is usually accompanied with too much deficiency and chaos, in fact, some emails should not be written nor sent at all, just like I wrote about how to have Better Meetings, I will try to propose my thoughts about how I like future email to be smart enough to enhance the way we communicate.

The best way to predict the future is to create it
Peter F. Drucker

I like Mind Mapping and to brainstorm the features I want in the smart email software I opened my preferred brainstorming tool Xmind and started to brainstorm, I found myself touching on calendar and tasks as well, as most of email applications integrate these 3 components.

Email

Profile

The application should provide different profile types, in the mindmap I just identified business and personal, the purpose defines the way we use email, for example using Gmail for sending personal emails is completely different than using Microsoft Outlook to communicate in office, the profile type should set certain features based on the selected profile

Send

Email software has evolved over the years, Gmail is providing a new paradigm to use email, and Microsoft Outlook 2007 has boosted the user experience a lot by providing the Ribbon based UI versus the traditional menus user interface that has been common for about two decades, yet most of current email software applications have many shortcomings, that can be resolved by providing the following features:

Emotional Intelligence

How many times did you respond to a nasty email while you were feeling angry? and how many times did you write an email and just hit the send button and after few minutes you said to yourself “I shouldn’t have written that!” or “I should have waited for sometime to think about it”, the current email software does not care about the way we feel, having an awareness of Emotional Intelligence is one of the best traits for any person and especially managers, while the software cannot change your emotions but it can help you to be in control of your emotions, this category is divided into two parts:

• Control Hastiness: the email software can help controlling hastiness by check the received date, read date, and response date, based on these three dates, it can alert you saying “ It is advisable to spend some time re-reading the message and improving the response before you send out a HASTY response”
• Control Anger: as per the Chinese saying “Never send a letter while you are angry”, if you send an email while you are angry it may destroy a work or personal relationship, and it is always better to think wisely before sending an angry email, today’s email software does not care about the way we feel, however with the concept of Word Analyzer (will come to this shortly) the email software can detect whether your message is angry, and it has to provide advices to re-word some words or even better to change the whole theme of the message

Word Analyzer

The email software has to analyze each and every word in the email and provide tips to change some words, the components of the word analyzer can be:

• Vulgar Filter: one letter can change the meaning of a word, while today’s email software has Spell Checker, the spell checker only cares whether the word is in dictionary or not, if it is spelled correctly, it will pass it to your recipients, and this may cause you big embarrassment, if you are a busy person who writes 100s of emails a day, you are very likely to commit this kind of spelling mistakes, and so the vulgar filter has to alert you, the vulgar filter has to be linked with the profile, for example if you’ve selected Business profile, it is very rare to send vulgar words in an email
• Missing Attachment: How many times have you sent an email where you refer some file attached, and after a few minutes you receive a reply from one of the recipients saying that “Attachment is missing!”, most of us have done this before, the word analyzer has to scan the message and spot words such as attachment, attached, PFA (please find attached), document, etc. and examine whether there is a file attached or not, if not it has to alert the user prior to sending the email, Thunderbird has this feature!
• Date & Time: the word analyzer should spot date & time and propose to add and item in the calendar or a reminder to the email, this would ensure that nothing slips through the cracks, Google Mail has this feature!

Respond

Sometimes we need to send standard responses to some emails, and it is not practical to manage response templates out of the email software, mundane responses have to be handled by the software, in the Respond category the proposed features are:

• Response Templates: the email software has to offer standard templates, it is ironic that basic mobile phones provide standard templates for SMS responses while email applications do not
• Smart Responder:the email software has to be smart enough to send standard responses, such as work in progress response, busy in meeting, etc. while this feature may be a bit risky but it can also add value to busy people

Receive

This category is for received emails (items in inbox)

• Reply Reminder: In our busy day, we may forget to respond to some emails, which may make the email sender frustrated, furthermore, some people take this kind of incidents personally and feel ignored, it also may distort the image of the one who is supposed to respond, the email software has to be smart enough to identify action emails and regularly remind the user of sending a response, the formula of action email classification would be inclusion of question marks, phrases such as “awaiting your response” or “looking forward to hearing from you”, etc. this is linked to the word analyzer date & time feature as depicted in the mindmap
• Emotional Indicator:the email software should be able to detect the emotions of the email sender, I consider this sort of breakthrough email feature, today, the email offers the importance flag which actually gets mixed with urgency, imagine yourself having one more category called emotional indicator that will help you detect the sender’s emotional mood, while some people may argue the usefulness of such a feature, I think understanding the mood of the sender would help drafting the optimal reply, a useful alert would be “ the email sender looks to be frustrated, maybe he is waiting for some item from your side, please send it and help him calm down, do not get defensive! ”, I can think of these indicators as a beginning: Frustrated, Sarcastic, Thankful, Reprimanding, Motivating, and Normal, ideally the email software has to guide the user to find the best professional response, this would help a lot of people especially those who easily get grumpy

Tasks

Most of email applications have embedded task management functionality, however most of those are quite basic, and lack the flavour of real world planning, the enhancements to the tasks management module can be:

• Effort Based: Microsoft Outlook and most email applications do not consider the effort while adding new task, the application just asks about the start & finish date, personally I do not prefer the duration-based scheduling, and in fact if you add 100 tasks to be done in parallel, you will never be alerted, this kind of attitude implies unrealistic task management
• Help Prioritize: effective prioritization can not be feasible unless the effort based issue is resolved, otherwise it would lead to fake priories, ideally the application has to help prioritizing the tasks based on FIFO, LIFO, etc.
• Alert Non-Realistic Deadlines: this is related to the previous two features, the user has to be alerted as and when unrealistic deadline are entered into the system, such as doing 20 tasks 2 days in a week’s time!

Calendar

Just like Tasks, calendar lack that intelligence to help organize our lives, for example if you receive four meeting invitations at the same time slot and you accept them all, the application will pass it, the following features can make calendar better:

• One Meeting at a time: the application has to allow one meeting only at a time, and should enforce declining or at least tentatively accepting other meetings happening at the same time, this would be better for the user and also for the senders who expect the invitee to attend the meeting
• Tracking: as a meeting organizer, you can track the acceptance of one meeting and see who accepted, declined, tentatively accepted, or did not open the invitation at all, the application has to remind the meeting organizer prior to the meeting about those who did not accept the invitation and the meeting organizer has to touch base with them in order to confirm attendance, while the tracking is there, it is not solid enough, and if the meeting organizer forgets to track the invitation the tracking feature would be useless in this case

Settings

The above features can be turned on or off via the settings, the settings categories can be:

• Emotional Intelligence: can be turned on or off, if it is on the user can select the moods to be monitored, like the application has to show emotional mood of received emails, and also should show the emotional indicator to the email the user is writing in real time fashion, this would help the user to tweak the language he uses to convey the proper impression
• Language Filter: if on the filter has to be dynamic one, and the use should be able to add or remove words, just like the case of the spell checker, if the filter is turned off, it has to work behind the scenes and alert the email writer for extremely offensive words, and ask the user whether to turn the filter on or not, this would leave no chance to send a nasty email out!

What do you think?

Do you have more features that you want to have in your dream email software? if so please leave a comment, if you liked this post tweet it and/or leave a comment, perhaps an email software provider will read these thoughts at some time and include them in next release!

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