TheMommyBlog

Thursday, January 15, 2009 Other people who write, Technology

I don’t subscribe to many email lists; in fact, I think I can count on one and a half hands the number to which I’ve intentionally and usefully subscribed, but I read an incredibly insightful post one day and thought, oh hell, might as well have SOME zen in my life. I subscribed to Zen Habits last week and it’s been paying off nearly every day.

Today’s post is brilliant: a list of features he’d like to see in GMail. He is already a huge fan, and given the improvements they’ve made over the years, thinks they do listen.

Google Features I’d Like To See
by Leo Babauta

• Ability to tell other Gmail users that I’m busy and can’t be bothered with more email, similar to how your status shows in Gmail chat, but appears when they’re about to email me. If they decide to email me anyway, despite my “Do Not Disturb” status, they will be warned that the email probably won’t be read, will be archived and become dusty, and that they’ll have to send a follow up message to me in a few days because I’ll have completely flaked on replying.
• The ability to remind you to follow up on an email if someone hasn’t replied and you’ve marked it as needing a follow up. Also, if you enable auto-follow-up, it’ll automatically follow up with a short, polite email. Or maybe it’ll just play a small coughing sound in the other person’s Gmail: “Ahem…”
• Phone answering service. Should be able to converse with the caller, and sound like me, and route any relevant info to Gmail. If the caller is a telemarketer, the Google service should try to sell them something, such as my book, and be very pushy about it. Don’t take “no” for an answer, Gphone!
• A button similar to “Report Spam” for when you receive a spam email, except that it says “Spam Back” and when you press it, the spammer receives all the spam you’ve received in the last 90 days.
• Yet another similar button that says “Report Joke/Chain” so that anytime someone keeps sending you joke emails, chain emails, or sappy forwarded emails, these are automatically filtered out (like spam is). Real emails from the same sender would be let through the filter. In addition, you can enable an automatic reply to the sender of chain/joke/forwarded emails that informs them that they really should pause longer before forwarding messages to people, as it fills up people’s inboxes needlessly, the blonde jokes weren’t very funny in the first place, and no, Bill Gates isn’t really tracking this chain email and won’t give you a million dollars for forwarding it.

It reminds me of the old days, managing the software for a foundation and listening to requests for new features, and thinking, “You want to do this… without people? What, you stay home and collect the paycheck?” He gets carried away, but I swear to peanuts if any of this becomes available I will be adding features like Count Dracula.

Heh. At the end of the post, is says, “Post written automatically by Google autoblogger.”

I love it.