Honestly, I must be in the minority with all of this. I keep seeing people write about this new avalanche of email they’re being buried under. Like it’s a new thing.

Aren’t most of us savvy enough to know which emails need to be dealt with right away and which are read and discarded? Haven’t we all learned the difference between spam and an email from mom? Why is this difficult?

I don’t need another app to buy postage or coins or something to get attention to my email ahead of someone else’s. My relationship and what I need from the person or what the person needs from me does that for me. For free. Imagine the concept.

I have 4 websites, work email, blog comments… and all together that brings in about 400 or so emails a day. Not a lot, but enough to keep me busy.

I’ve never felt like I’ve gotten behind in answering a single one of those because I know which ones need my attention, and which ones can just sit.

The problem isn’t email. The problem is how we manage our conversations through email. The problem is how we designate weight to what’s answered and what’s just read and filed for information. The problem is most often the user.

I just switched to GMail and I love it, but to be brutally honest, it’s no different than other e-mail providers. I will never use the amount of storage, whether it’s 3GB on Google or unlimited storage on Yahoo. That aspect simply does not appeal to me… Yes, if a service has storage under 10MB, I might reconsider – but that’s even stretching it.

I just want to be able to reach out to my contacts more effectively. I want to be able to easily define my contacts, to be able to let me choose who can or can’t get in touch with me based on network depth. LinkedIn and others are fine at doing that, but your limited to the depth of their walled garden.

Registrars sell digital postage stamps, that we affix to our emails. I set my email client to accept all emails from people on my contacts list for free; other emails must have at least X cents worth of stamps attached. Emails with less than this are returned with a polite message saying ‘insufficient postage’. Someone famous might set X very high, but most people would set it at one or two cents. Even at this low threshold, this would instantly eliminate the business model for spam – do the numbers, on their costs versus the minuscule response rate.

Bill Gates suggested this a few years ago, and I think this idea’s time is going to come…

(In the meantime, I concur with the previous reader who remarked on Gmail’s incredible ability to largely eliminate spam. Gmail accounts are accessible via POP3, and I route all my email through one, just to filter out the spam first – works really well)

There are plenty anti-spam techniques based on the reputation of the sender that mitigates the equality of all messages. And a good combination of several techniques (rule based, statistical, reputation, …) can successfully classify most of the spam.

On my personal email account (low traffic) I have received around 16K spam messages in last year, and I hardly see a couple a week in my inbox. So I’m sorry, but if your inbox is full of spam … pay for a better service!! (yes they exist, some email providers takes spam filtering seriously)

Om – you are a famous blogger. A good one at that. You get tons of email.

Most people, even those very involved with the Web, are not at the level of being at email bankruptcy. Sure, we may be close, but I get about 200 work-related and 15-20 personal emails per day and it works out fine. You learn to filter emails based on who they are from, what they are about, etc.

What I do think would be more useful is an email system that could improve on the current web-based platforms by allowing you to have emails categorized and prioritized.

@ Matt at Xobni – No offense but your company has one of the worst names ever. How does one even pronounce that? Vinod Khosla is a smart guy but I’m not sure you’re going to fix emails problems despite your “sunglasses required” approach. At least you have free Naked Juice though. How about you actually explain what on earth you do rather than sounding like a bunch of arrogant 23 year olds on your blog?

Again, just storming in my brain :)

The revolution is about changing the way we perceive email. The next generation email is Fukzu Mail (F-Mail). Most ask us how different is it? It’s different enough to validate a shift in thinking and behavior.

Rebel.Embrace.Live

Read more at http://www.fukzu.com – redefining online mail!!!

Vijay