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March 30, 2006

Don't mail me, I'll poll you

Email is broken. I'll write a rant on it another day. But if you ever see me with a Blackberry, please increase my medication dosage until I stop mumbling and lie down quietly.

My basic view is "every email is a failure to have found a more appropriate contextual communications channel".

But, what if we tried to rescue something from the attention wreckage of email? Here's one idea. Why don't we have a standard where mailing lists can tag their messages with a header like "RSS-Tag: http://www.telepocalypse.net/". The email reader would do two things:

  • It would have an option to by default re-direct such emails into your feed reader. See it, read it, goodbye. No need to delete or file. No need to treat it as a "to do" item, which is how most people use their inbox.
  • It would use the autodiscovery mechanism from the URL given to offer the user a choice of additional, real, RSS-based feeds.

Is such a thing really so complex? Surely the benefit outweighs the cost? And it's entirely edge-based -- no need to upgrade any email servers or relay points in the middle. I already manually use email-to-RSS, but if it was automated, it'd be so much easier.

Posted by Martin Geddes at 1:30 PM
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