Netizen

Thursday, December 20, 2012

The Email Quagmire

What would a perfect email program be like? Right now that is anyone's guess. A good program would allow you to ignore all emails you don't mind ignoring.

Just like Craig's List is not one service, it is many services, email is the same way. Facebook is an email offshoot. You don't need to share photos over email anymore.

Asana doing task management takes a lot of load off email. Calendaring is another key function.

Character Limits In Email
Outlook.com: Microsoft's New Attempt At Email
Asana's Inbox: Work Email
Email Solutions

Startups Aim to Bring E-Mail Back to the Future

There hasn’t been a big shakeup since the release of Gmail in 2004, which brought threaded messages and a gigabyte of free message storage (an eye-popping amount at the time). By now, many of us are encountering so-called e-mail overload on PCs, smartphones, and tablets. And e-mail shows no sign of disappearing. ...... unlikely that we’ll see another large, independent e-mail service emerge anytime soon ... toting our Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail addresses around with us like cell-phone numbers. .... we’re trying to use it in ways that were never intended—as an organizer, for example, or to facilitate collaboration on group projects. .... Mailbox is trying to reimagine the in-box as a workflow tool ..... E-mail is based on two protocols, IMAP and POP, which are decades old and have never changed much. .... his service aims to bring context to communication—telling you what’s happening around you, who’s e-mailing you, how you’re connected, why they’re important. ..... small in-boxes, poor search, and a preponderance of spam. ...... Flow control: e-mail is always coming in, and we’re expected to be checking and responding to it at all times. ...... “Unfortunately, that’s not something you can fix with technology”

This feels doable in this century.

Possible habitable zone planet is a mere 12 light years away

there are several planets around the nearby star Tau Ceti, and one of them is likely to be within the star's habitable zone. ...... Once they had that in hand, the astronomers turned to the actual data from Tau Ceti without any added signals. And, this time, three signals did pop out, with each of them adding between 1010 and 1017 to the statistical fit with the real data. The authors concluded that there were three planets in this signal, orbiting with periods of 14, 35, and 94 days. ...... adding two more planets to their model increased the fit, although not by nearly the same degree. One orbited with a period of 630 days, the second at 168 days. The latter one is the object that resides in Tau Ceti's habitable zone; it has a mass that's at least four times that of Earth's.