[Design] Sorting through the morning mail

[joel finkle]

My earlier message about Outlook's poorly-responsive rules engine reminded 
me of another thought stream, which has now been filtered through Ducky's 3D 
metaphors and several other suggestions here.

Most e-mail user agents place the user at the 'top' of the inbox at entry.  
In Outlook, this is the first item in whatevever sort order you've chosen.  
For me and most people I've shoulder-surfed, that's going to be "Received" 
order, newest on top.  That makes sense, because I've usually got a handful 
of "undismissed" items on the bottom of my inbox* -- many people I work with 
will have 100-400 messages sitting around not yet handled.  But I want to 
deal with my messages "in order," especially so I can get the thread of a 
conversation that happened overnight, for instance.

So I find myself starting at the top (most recent), scanning downward, 
deleting commercial SPAM, corporate SPAM (How Human Resources Can Help 
You!), out-of-office autoreplies, "Fred has agreed to come to your meeting" 
messages, etc., until I come to the bottom of the 'new' items, at which 
point I bounce back up through the list to actually read stuff.**

To make a long story short, what I really want to do is have my Inbox view 
start in the middle: Above the less-important 'old' mail, but below the 
most-recent 'new' mail.  That puts my focus right where work needs to get 
done.  A 'home' key should take me back there, although mid-day, there's 
usually less of a mail backlog than at initial program startup each day.

Joel

*(I abuse Outlook by re-marking items "Unread" that need action before I can 
dismiss them, and leaving "Read" items in the inbox if they're upcoming 
events that are relatively passive, but unscheduled, or of lower priority -- 
all of which should probably be in the To-Do list, but that just doesn't 
work the way I want it).

**(This was much more laborious before my company spun off the division I 
used to work for, and through which most of my SPAM arrived -- I've gone 
from an average of 60 UCEs a day on that account to under one a month -- 
mainly because I've moved all my mailing lists and such to this account)

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