Things Your Mail Client Knows About You But Isn't Saying

All email clients show variations of the same basic information: a list of emails in your Inbox, together with their subject, sender, and date, how many unread emails there are in other folders, and perhaps a bit of extra information about each email. Web-based email clients like GMail and Hotmail also show how much online storage is still available to the user. Some of this is immediately useful information, no doubt, but it’s close to useless when it comes to the most important thing you can learn from your email: the pattern of how you work.

Consider, to begin with, the status of your conversation with each person with whom you have at any point exchanged emails. With some little work, it’s easy to find if you have an unread mail from an specific person, or when was the last time that you sent them an email. But do you know the names of the people you haven’t contacted in over six months? Are you aware of those whose contacts, although still not very frequent, have been increasing over time? Do you know who you email more often and whose emails you read the most? Humans are very good at managing small face-to-face social networks, and you could easily answer similar questions regarding your closest family members and friends. But our email social networks — even or specially work-related — are larger and more complex, and most of us simply aren’t aware of “how we are doing” with most of our correspondents.

Your email system, of course, has the information. But it isn’t saying.

Your email system also knows who writes the longest emails, and who gets replies most often. It also knows who reads and answers to long emails, and who seems to ignore anything longer than a couple of lines. Wouldn’t that information be useful while you’re writing them an email?

Beyond the bare information of who writes to whom, there’s the flow of content. Software isn’t yet clever enough to understand our emails, but it’s rather good at sorting and tagging it. Email systems could — and should — tell you what you’ve been talking about with whom and since when. Writing an email about a certain topic should make available related emails, whether they were sent to your recipient or to their boss.

But most importantly, email systems should show you the patterns in how you use email. Do you usually delay answering to some person? (procrastination, avoidance, something else?) How many long email discussions are you still keeping up? Do you usually receive emails or send them? (and from or to whom?) What potential relationships have you let die?

The information and tools that our email systems give us today are of immediate use. But professional and process improvement begins with the awareness of existing patterns, patterns that we are too caught in the day-to-day urgency of writing and answering emails to perceive, but that our software could easily figure out. The processing of email network data is already an useful tool for organizational analysis, but that’s too far removed from direct use. Your email system has information about your emails; you should need nobody’s intervention in order to learn what it says about you.

Whether we work mostly over email, IM, Twitter, or even Google Wave, we are sitting over a potentially very valuable treasure of information about our work patterns, information that could allow us to improve, expand, automate, and streamline how we work. All that’s needed is for software to tells us what it has already seen.