CTO Blog

In the years after, the pressure of public opinion became too much and I had to relinquish my loved, automatic rule. It may be coincidence, but that was just before the Internet Bubble collapsed.

I’m still looking for ways to deal with the E-mail Pool though, and I’m sure this pertains to the bulk of you. It makes it even more remarkable that the IT industry has made so little advances in tackling this. Sure, there are some interesting solutions in the area of e-mail response management systems (see Siebel, RightNow Technologies and Kana for example) but they are yet focused on service and marketing centres.

Why not use some of this fancy natural language processing, automatic routing and self-calibrating agent technology to ease the life of millions of e-mail haunted office workers and truly boost their individual productivity? We have excellent anti-spam plug-ins for Outlook and Thunderbird that can recognise and catch many different types of unwanted email. And they get better by the day. So where are the plug-ins that can analyse serious incoming e-mail and the way they are handled by an individual, categorise and prioritise them and then can process 70% of the routine actions (forwarding, archiving, replying, scheduling, planning tasks) automatically?

I would call that a Killer App. And given the fact that many Killer Apps are born in the Open Source community, I did a quick search on SourceForge, just to get a feeling of the Zeitgeist around e-mail management. There’s not much yet, although MailManager looks like a promising project with an active developer group. Makes you wonder why we haven’t picked up the opportunity yet to come to the rescue of so many affected professionals. After all, it’s The IT People that brought you e-mail in the first place.

Where’s the IT industry? What is cooking in the remote labs of IBM, Microsoft and Oracle? And what’s keeping up the Open Source community? We're anxious for your suggestions.

Just don’t e-mail them.