AfterMail: email archive RSS alerts
Basic summary of Aftermail:
“Simple in concept, but highly functional in deployment, AfterMail automatically captures email messages sent through an email server, and intelligently stores them in a single, separate, centralized email archival and analysis system. Once stored, AfterMail provides easy access to these messages, allowing permitted users to search and retrieve their own messages, or for managers and administrators to search across the entire organization.”
AfterMail’s latest press release mentions that it is now RSS enabled.
Now people can search their email and get an RSS, so when the search term appears in new email you will get new feed content.
Benefit of this is that when you look at your full inbox in the morning, you don’t really know what is personally pertinent to you, but if you have set up a search term feed, you can sort through your new email by keyword, helping you decide the order of importance
(NOTE: it’s not a subject term, but only a keyword).
Maybe you could also restrict your search term feed to an email group or a selection of email addresses, as well as your whole inbox.
At the manager level, it seems they can search through an email archive (privacy issues?) of the whole email system - I wonder if they too can limit this to certain addresses or groups.
This is starting to sound like security intelligence, because if you can subscribe to an RSS feed of any keyword that appears in any new email across your whole company, it is akin to intelligence units using computers to pick up keywords from phone conversations.
A thought…maybe your inbox could be ranked according to keywords (including keywords highlighted in the message, and even listed in a keyword field, next to the title field or date field).
A lot of the problem today is information overload, in the sense you get pushed a lot of email’s you don’t care about, hopefully enterprise RSS solutions will help build a “pull” culture instead (this will take a while as email is a killer application, people love it’s simplicity and effectiveness - reading feeds in your email client I think will be more successful, or at least the bridge to using a Feed only reading client)
…since you can’t do anything about receiving push email overload, maybe you could have a choice to view email by search term.
That is, when you get a push or broadcast email you don’t care about, ban it from your inbox but allow it in a special search term inbox (kind of like a junk mail box), but you only see the mail if it has the search term, otherwise the system deletes it before you see it, or you could receive all mail in your junk box but have it ranked by search term, with the terms highlighted, this makes it easier to glean over and confidently delete.
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There’s a lot you can do with email once it’s in a database which is what AfterMail enables and exposes through EEI:
http://www.saleplane.com/portal/AfterMail-EEI-scenarios/tabID__3399/DesktopDefault.aspx
Comment by Ed Daniel — September 14, 2005 @ 8:33 pm