[Design] High End Email

[Jonathan Blocksom]

I wasn't actually thinking about the majority of people when I wrote 
this.  The majority of people don't use personal trainers, either, but 
there's still a market for them.  Most people today are still fairly 
casual users of email; they need to check it once or twice a day at 
work and then check their personal email to check and see if they've 
received any new pictures of their grandkids or anything.  The biggest 
problem these people have is spam, not email management.

I'm specifically thinking of people whose business depends on their 
email.  People who receive at least a few dozen emails a day and spend 
a couple of hours dealing with it all.  Possibly the head of a 
marketing company, or the principal of a school.  These folks have to 
page through their lives on a dinky laptop screen and need all the help 
they can get, and my hunch is that any tool powerful enough to do what 
they need is going to take a long time to learn.  I also hazard a guess 
that it's going to cost a significant amount of money to come up with 
this tool, which is why I don't think it'd appear at a $50 price point 
or would come out of an open source project.  But must open source 
projects don't have the people & finance behind them that OSAF does, so 
I could be wrong -- and the Email Personal Trainers that I predict may 
not come with a $500 email package but instead might be independent 
consultants who have their clients install Chandler as the first step.

JB

On Thursday, March 6, 2003, at 01:28 PM, Kaitlin Duck Sherwood wrote:
>> Along with this email program, by the way, should come world class 
>> support. Not just a mailing list and web forum but an email personal 
>> trainer. A real person who walks you through setting up the program 
>> for the first time, and who calls you once a week for the first few 
>> months to talk about how the program has been working for you and 
>> teaching you more of its features.
> Based on my recent experience as the author of some books on how to 
> deal with email overload *and* as a "get through your email faster" 
> trainer, I am not sure that people would actually make use of this.  I 
> met an amazing number of people who were almost hostile to the idea of 
> spending any time learning how to get through email faster.  Why?  
> Unclear, but I think it's a combination of the following;...

---
Jonathan Blocksom
http://www.gollygee.com/weblogs/jblocksom/
GollyGee Software, Inc. -- http://www.gollygee.com