A lot of people have tried to fix it, and yet, here we are. Crappy email experiences rule the day.
Personally, my big problem with email is that I want to read 5 messages out of every 100 I receive.
As a result, I spend the majority of my time deleting email messages.
There has to be a better way.
And I think there can be a better way. It wouldn't take much.
Here's my solution: If I haven't read an email in a 24-hour period, it gets automatically deleted (or archived, if that's safer).
This is a simple, no muss, no fuss solution to a silly little irritance.
I don't mind getting the messages. From a subject line and a few lines of the email I generally know if it's worth reading or not.
I do mind having to delete all the crap I'm not going to read.
The good thing about this solution is that Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft should be able to add it as a feature in a few hours. No need to radically overhaul something that really doesn't need radical overhaul.
The time limits could vary depending on user preference. Emails could be deleted after 12 hours of sitting there, 24 hours, 48 hours, a week, or a month.
Sounds pretty great, right?
For what it's worth, our chief architect Pax Dickinson wrote a script that should do this. I'm currently testing it. If it works, I'll drop the script here. If it doesn't work ... well, it's the reason I'm not getting your email.