Ever since Internet was born, the technologies have always changed. The way we use it, the things we do with it, almost about everything. Nothing, to my memory, has survived for time too long. If there is one thing though, that has managed to live on till date, it is got to be the Email.
Posts have become a thing of the past and to have an email address has, kind of become a necessity. And, yeah, you know. How important it is to have an email address today. I don’t want to bore you with stuff you already know. I’m here to tell you those things you don’t know about or rather, probably talk about things you wished you had in your email.
We’ve always had this feeling sometime that “this feature could’ve been there” or “Why didn’t these guys come up with stuff like that?”. Although, we manage to somehow get our job done, it really pisses us off sometimes, doesn’t it? I’m not sure about you, it happens to me very often. The UI is slick, neat and very great. Super cool, okay. Not to blame the teams that are working behind the screens to bring us an awesome email service. They’ve brought almost everything we asked for. But, there are things I’ve always wanted to have like…
Better Filters – based on Size, Attachments and more
“Filters are already there, to sort and label emails. What are you talking about?” Dude, I can point out at least a dozen of them in a crowd of twenty to tell that they missed the size based email search. People send us all kinds of junk over email – softwares, songs, video, documents and what not? It might not be the very efficient way to collaborate but it really is a safest, easiest and perhaps even the laziest thing to do. Over the time, our mailbox gets piled up with all things, we didn’t wanted to have in first place. And we always have a hard time searching for mails that contain big attachments and try to delete them. How about having a filter for the same? Makes our job a lot easier. This stays the same for searching for attachments that are all word documents or image files. Having better filter search options is the need of the hour.
URL Shorteners
I don’t know if you’ve wanted this. But, I’ve wanted to have this option for a very long time now. Hyperlinks in email are always there. We tend to send every link possible in an email. There are people I know who send Google Search Results link in email. What the heck? I would almost feel like closing my palms, tighten the grip and hit down the table thrice for making friends with them. Only if there could be a URL shortener add on within an email.
I do agree, URL shorteners have an inherent risk factor – “What if the service is down?” But, I’ve hardly seen that happen. Even if not a must, you can have it as a “enable-upon-request” feature.
Social Integration
It is almost there. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter integration within emails. Google provides only Google Plus and Hotmail has tried to bring all the rest in its new Outlook. There isn’t a thing I can criticize about the Outlook. It’s near perfect experience. Also, you can’t expect everybody to have the ‘social service’ provided within their emails. Largely because of acquisitions and legal stuff. Microsoft has shares with Facebook and it is no way going to get into Gmail. It still needs to be seen, how emails are going to get past the social networks. Arrival of social sites will never, at any point, mean the death of email. But, it has already taken over a significant toll. Nobody uses email for regular communication. If email doesn’t get adopted to cater social needs, future doesn’t look so good with emails.
Newsletter Unsubscribe Options
Probably the biggest junk makers – Newsletters. Everybody signs up for a newsletter or two. But, we never read them though. May be one in a week or so. Thanks to ‘Mark as Read’ button 😀 And suddenly, one day, out of the blue, comes a thought to unsubscribe. We sit down energized to look into every email possible and make sure we come out of all the services we’ve signed up for. But, it’s no piece of cake. It can be so annoying that we’d rather try to leave them as such than trying to unsubscribe. If we can however, list all the services that we’re subscribed to – some intelligent service that runs within the email to show the subscriptions, things are bliss then.
Intelligent Reminders
We would have received invites and reminders to reply to someone within a time frame and date. But, by then, we would be in a flurry of other emails that we literally forget to send a response. How about an email bot popping up just in the right time to remind you that you need to send something to someone? One thing, I could compromise everything else for.
Anonymous Sender Option
We talk of privacy and security all the time. But, how many of you do know that you can be tracked to your location with the email you send? It is not a must, but, just taking the user security into concern, there can be a paid service that lets the users send their emails via another anonymous server. Upon request by an authority, in case of necessity, the origin might be revealed.
Download Email
Means, to download the email received as PDF, XPS or other print ready formats. More than half the online booking portals send confirmation messages as emails. But, to copy paste the contents onto a Word document doesn’t seem like an intelligent option to do. There can be this “export as” option in emails.
IMAP support within Mail
IMAP and POP3 are two popular message fetching mechanisms employed for an email. POP3 downloads every possible content that’s already there and it doesn’t affect the content in the server. IMAP on the other hand reflects to the server, whatever you do with the local copy. For obvious reasons, IMAP is much better than POP3. Email services have always, for reason unknown to me, has supported only POP3. Having IMAP within its web UI will also make things look good.