Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Things They Should Invent: multiple customizable email alerts

I have visual and audible email alerts for both my personal and my work email.  In general I'd rather have the alerts than not, but what I'd really like is to get alerts only for emails that are important.

For example, in my personal email, I'd like to get alerted about personal communications from family and friends, ebay auctions that I've won or been outbid on, and anything from my banks, my apartment building, or my condo that require immediate action.  I don't need to get alerted about "Here's our newsletter!" or "Sign this petition!" or "This is to confirm that you made the paypal purchase that you made literally 2 seconds ago."  I'll look at those things later, but I don't need to interrupt what I'm doing to look at them.

Similarly, in my work email, I'd like to get alerted about new assignments, emails from clients, and specific personal communication from my team.  I don't need to be alerted about "Here's the employee newsletter!" or "This is just to let you know that I will be away Friday." Again, I'll look at them later, but they don't require my immediate attention.

Gmail has a function where they automatically mark certain email threads as more important, and it works reasonably well if you put in the effort to train it (I did briefly and was happy with the rate at which it was learning, but then I got lazy and stopped using it.)  So why not pair this up with Gmail Notifier so it notifies you only when you get an email that meets "important" criteria?  Or perhaps give you a different kind of beep for the more important emails?

Outlook allows you to create all kinds of finicky rules, so why not allow you to create rules defining what kind of alert the program gives you?  You could tell it to give you the "important" alert if you get an email from certain senders or in reply to an email that you yourself have sent.  If you can convince your colleagues to use good subject lines, you could get one kind of alert for "FYI" emails and another for "For Action" emails.

Properly implemented, this would allow people to have all the benefits of email alerts with none of the disadvantages.  So why don't we have it already?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

They have this. In Apple mail, simply add key people to your VIP list and you get alerted when messages arrive. In Gmail, make sure you turn on the ability to have a second / alternate inbox. In your preferences, cstomize what goes into that inbox and use it as your default.

impudent strumpet said...

Really, I didn't know that! How easy is it to move something if it ends up in the wrong inbox? Can Gmail Notifier be configured to notify only for the second inbox?