Tag Archives: email

Throw away mailing lists

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Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you are on a mailing list and you want to send an email to all but 2 members on that list? A common case here is planning a surprise for someone on that list.

Photo by http://www.anna-om-line.com/

In general, I find myself on (long) email threads containing a different subset of people for different occasions (birthdays, anniversaries etc) several times a year. The email threads quickly become long and unwieldy. People keep adding other people as the thread progresses, and the only way the new adds can figure out whats going on is looking at the content of future emails. There is no way for anyone to go back and read all the discussion so far.

That got me thinking, wouldn’t it be great to have a service that provide throw away mailing lists? Hear me out. Here’s how the service would work:

  • To start a new mailing list, I simply send an email to newlist@mycoolservice.com. In the email, I also include a list of email addresses I want to seed the list with.
  • The service sends me back the address of a newly created throw away list. This could be of the form some-random-number@googlegroups.com.
  • For all practical purposes, this is exactly like any other mailing list (or Google Group). We can add more members, search the messages etc.
  • Start your discussion and let the thoughts flow.
  • …
  • At some point, the purpose behind the list will cease to exist (successful surprise, for instance). Needless to add, further discussions on the topic will also cease.
  • You forget you even created this mailing list. After the mailing list has been idle for some time (say two weeks), the service automatically deletes the mailing list. Any future messages to that address will bounce back saying that the list has been deleted, please contact the administrator.

Does anyone else think this could be useful?

What did you do last year?

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Happy new year y’all!

The past couple of days my feed reader has been chock full of posts about one of the following: the year in review, predictions for 2008, reflections and introspections. So much so that I got tired of reading about the “new year” and never got around to writing MY end of the year post, but I’m sure the world didn’t miss much. But I did run into an interesting problem as I was thinking about what could have been my end of the year post: exactly what all did I do last year?

So I started by writing down all the months, the idea being that I would put down all the significant events that happened in any given month next to it. The hope is that there aren’t that many of them so the list should be fairly manageable. Now, I have always known that my memory is not that great, and that is why I tend to rely on tools to do the dirty book keeping for me: calendars, todo lists, reminders etc. But it was still a little shocking when I couldn’t immediately recall what I did in lets say May of last year. Of course I did remember things once I thought about it a little bit, often relying on context (what happened before May, after May etc).

The bottom line is that it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. For some months, I actually had to go back to my email inbox and other digital archives to figure out the salient happenings. This got me thinking about **personal information analysis and visualization**. And the more I thought about it, the more excited I became.

I was actually surprised to find such little information on the web about this. With our increasing information overload, cheap storage, and tons of archived data (online and offline), I think this space has tremendous potential for both academic and commercial ventures. For instance, here’s a really simple thing I want to be able to do: for a given time period (say 2007), I want to analyze and visualize all of my emails so that I can quickly figure out:
* who did I communicate with the most?
* what were the main topics I wrote about?

I couldn’t find any open source tool to do even this. And my initial Googling hasn’t turned up much in commercial offerings either. The closest thing I could find was a project called [[http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/projects/themail/study/index.htm|themail]] from MIT Media Labs, but there’s no code that I can download. Then there is [[http://carohorn.de/anymails/|Anymails]], but it seems just a cool visualization, and not a lot of information (specially the kind I want).

If you know about any free or paid tools that can do this kind of analysis, please drop a line in the comments. And while you are at it, try to think about what YOU did all of last year :-)

Not a chance

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It is because I keep coming across stories like [[http://www.yepthatsme.com/2005/07/24/apple-mail-in-tiger-can-kiss-it/|this]], that I don’t think I will ever be able to embrace Apple. I just don’t understand — here you have a [[http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/mail/ | nice email app]] (or so I’ve heard) and email is one of the few things that has been standardized to death on the Internet due to the simple fact that people like to read their email //anywhere, everywhere, all the time//.

So why, oh why does Apple has to go around inventing proprietary formats for storing local mail? Why can’t they use the excellent [[http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html|Maildir]] format, when almost every other email client in the world does it? The excuse that this format is //optimised// for [[http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/|Spotlight]] is bullshit. They brag so much about their API for enabling Spotlight support in applications, then why couldn’t they just write a backend for Maildir files (the way [[http://beaglewiki.org/Main_Page|Beagle]] does!)

Also, apparently this change is new to Tiger, and so old Mac OSX users are affected too. Even if they decided to change the format, is it too much to ask that the software confirms with the user before doing the upgrade, or atleast //informs// the user that something drastic is happening to his/her files? So much for desiging good user interfaces. Sheesh! Why don’t these people ever learn?