Funny that Anne mentions teenagers and the evolving world of technology. My 15 year old (happy birthday!) sent me seven text messages in the time it took to write this blog entry. Facebook is her universe, but email is strictly for reading information from adults and moving attachments from place to place.

Back to the question at hand… What would an ideal email management system look like? Modern email management systems share a number of standard capabilities which we are all familiar with, so I won’t list them here. Here are some non-standard (wish list?) capabilities which could take email management to the next level:

The ability to segregate messages by “type” and have the email system manage retention and classification somewhat automatically (caveat: one of our clients is already doing this, but it’s still a novel concept).

Automated analytics that examine the contents of a message and ‘suggest’ how to segregate it (see the previous capability). Some email, e.g. “let’s have lunch”, gets placed in a bucket where it is auto-deleted at the end of some predefined time period. Some represents business correspondence and / or records and the system provides a suggestion(s) about where to classify it and automatically extracts metadata.

One fantasy capability is to automatically delete those “Thanks” emails and somehow list them by sender in a separate mail client window – If only is right!

These are just a couple of thoughts – anyone have any to add?