Getting the inbox to do a little thinking for you

Its obituary has been written many times before, but the email has shown more resilience than the proverbial cat with many lives. Now, it’s time for another makeover to suit the social media and smart-phone age.

To hold user interest, the email now needs to do much more than just be faster than snail mail, especially with the birth of chat apps like Slack which, with its file sharing and other features, has been dubbed “the email killer”.

Players like Google, IBM and Microsoft have realised that for the email to remain relevant, it would have to assume capabilities that makes it more of a personal assistant.

What if the email inbox became smart enough to tell you which mail to read first? Or, if it could sort hundreds of mails into different categories such as finance, bills, news, social and promotions? The answers to these and other questions are resulting in the metamorphosis of the email.

Organising mails Google has launched its invitation-only software ‘Inbox’ that addresses the biggest email problem — having to search for messages from friends and family from hundreds of promotions and spam.

The ‘Inbox’ lets users organise the emails into different folders. It also does things like tracking purchased flight tickets and alerting users ahead of the flight time.

Sundar Pichai, Senior Vice-President at Google, said email in the current form has been losing relevance because important information gets buried inside messages, and important tasks can slip through the cracks—especially when we’re working on our phones.

“For many of us, dealing with email has become a daily chore that distracts from what we really need to do — rather than helping us get those things done,” Pichai wrote in a recent post on Google’s blog.

IT industry analysts estimate that 108 billion work emails are sent daily, requiring employees to check their inboxes an average of 36 times an hour. Compounding the problem, it is also estimated that only 14 per cent of those emails are of critical importance.

While email remains the single most widely used collaboration tool, such challenges were making it less relevant.

IBM recently launched Verse, which marries social media content with traditional email on its Lotus Notes software. “It integrates how employees connect with each other daily—whether through calendars, email, file sharing, instant messaging, etc., through a single collaboration environment,” said Anmol Nautiyal, Director of IBM social business and IBM smarter workforce.

Social media effect One of the main reasons companies are reinventing the email is because users are flocking to social media. According to research by Radicati group, the total number of worldwide email accounts is expected to increase from 3.9 billion accounts in 2013 to 4.9 billion by 2017.

However, Facebook alone has 1.4 billion users, and according to Mobile World Congress, by the end of 2014, there will be 7.3 billion cell-phone users worldwide.

“In the future there will be more email integration apps right from tracking emails to analysing a reader’s behaviour in terms of time spent in a particular section,” said Swati Nathani, co-founder of Team Pumpkin, a social media agency.

Vikas Chawla, co-founder, Social Beat, said the inbox could be customised in such a way that certain emails will show up at specific times.

For its part, Microsoft will look to better Google and IBM when it launches the new Outlook next year.

The tech major this month opened up its programming interface to third-party developers to enable users to access their content across different devices.

COMMENT NOW