Three Step Plan To Improve Email

I have a three step plan to improve email. It is:

1. Invent time travel

2. Travel back in time to when email was being invented

3. Convince the developers to put in a feature where you could withdraw from an email chain

I think you can see where I’m going with this. Most of us have been on an email chain with a large number of recipients that really doesn’t have anything much to do with us. We already know that no follow up email could possibly be relevant to us. Yet, whoever sent out the chain put all the addresses in either the “To” field or the “CC” field as opposed to the “BCC” field so we keep getting additional emails commenting on the chain that have nothing to do with us. Worse, people on the chain keep replying to the sender and clicking “Reply All” for reasons that are completely baffling.

PEOPLE: STOP CLICKING “REPLY ALL” FOR MESSAGES THAT DO NOT NEED TO GO TO EVERYONE IN AN EMAIL CHAIN!

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was something you could do to withdraw from an email chain to stop getting irrelevant additions? Kind of like how Facebook lets you withdraw from a private message chain someone has started that you don’t want further updates on? Wouldn’t this be nice?

It’s too late, though. Sure, you can add a rule or filter or something to your email client or reading interface, whatever, each and every time this happens. That gets a bit cumbersome, though. It seems a bit too late to fix this for email…but I wish it wasn’t.