Not quite reading e-mail
E-mail is a troubled medium. It’s not that it isn’t incredibly useful as a quick way to communicate with someone. It’s just that everyone is so flooded with messages that they when they don’t respond immediately, the message gets lost in the abyss of their inbox, easily forgotten.
Mobile e-mail aggravates the problem. I check messages all the time on my iPhone, but don’t respond right away because I don’t have time or the iPhone keyboard isn’t the best for longer responses. However, the message is marked as “read” when I get back to my computer even though I’m not truly done with “reading” it and responding.
What if reading e-mail wasn’t so binary and offered more options than just read or unread. What if there was a “skimmed” setting for e-mail? Could e-mail be location- and time-aware, knowing that you just glanced at the note with a mobile device without fully reading it, and then remind you later when you’re at a desktop, able to digest it and craft a response?
