Controlling the inbox

The benefits of an opt in approach to the information overload conundrum has been one of the arguments underpinning the use of feeds to replace emails. We have been successful here in EY in the UK at keeping the feed reader we rolled out exclusively under the control of the individual. No feeds are enforced and the rollout included only two feeds as samples.

The inbox remains a different story. You cannot control who sends you emails or when. Notes 8 has a nifty indicator that shows the level to which an email is directed at me - if I'm the only recipient, one of a few, cc'd or one of many. However, I still can't get away from those threads where I'm cc'd in and the discussion is of no relevance. Yet, like most mail clients, Notes can trace a threaded conversation.

I can easily create rules to shunt emails into trash (based on the subject), but I thought it would be nice to be able to right-click on a message and say 'Tune out of conversation'. This would create a rule (based on the thread id) that would move any such emails to a configurable location (trash or a folder, potentially marking them as read along the way).

Over time the number of rules may grow to such an extent that performance suffers, so rules of this nature could auto-destruct after a month or two, or when the list grows beyond a certain size.