Patent Application
20050267944
The subject matter relates generally to electronic messaging and more specifically to an email manager.
Executives, receptionists, and even home computer users may face several hundred new emails accrued in an inbox upon returning from an extended vacation or even an overnight absence. These computer users may also face hundreds of unopened emails if an active email address has fallen into the hands of spammers or unsolicited syndicated advertisers.
For many executives and receptionists, the volume of new emails received daily is so great that at times the deluge results in the human equivalent of a “denial of service” attack, in which the executive or receptionist is incapacitated from usual job duties by having to deal with email as a nearly full-time job. Often the mere sorting of the email takes a great deal of time, let alone answering the email.
Conventional spam filters may help some users who are overwhelmed with incoming email. But sometimes almost all of the received email is important, in which case a spam filter does not help. An overwhelmed user typically makes a manual first pass through new email attempting to pick out the most important items that should receive immediate attention and simultaneously sifting out irrelevant items with the delete key. Items of only intermediate importance, such as desirable but not urgent emails from an RSS news feed, are left alone. This human sorting process, however, is faulty.
If a very important email is found and given immediate attention, the interruption distracts and upsets the human process of prioritizing and triaging email according to its urgency. Further, the first impression of a newly received email is often based only on the subject line, and subject lines are often cryptic or misleading. An email entitled “your bank account” could be advertising or could be a bona fide notification of account status from a bank. Since almost every kind of information can now be sent via email, the problem of having to prioritize large volumes of incoming email increases.
Email management for an inbox directs emails to various categories based on importance assigned by an email recipient and provides a user interface for presenting emails to the recipient in groups prioritized by importance. Categorization can be based on variable criteria, such as importance of the sending entity and/or email content and/or similarity of content to a predetermined content.
In one implementation, an exemplary email manager may include a category generator to create importance categories. This allows a user to set up custom categories according to taste and assign custom priority to the categories. An email sorter assigns each received email to one of the importance categories using trainable filters. Since trainable filtering logic and dynamic rules can be used, an exemplary email manager can develop greater decision-making power and negotiate more difficult email categorizations as ongoing use proceeds. The user interface can provide a single-stop screen location to navigate between email in different importance categories.
Various email managers and related techniques presented herein apply computing power to the task of triaging and organizing email in an inbox, especially newly received, unread email messages (i.e., “emails” or just “mail”). As inboxes grow larger with an increasing volume of daily unread emails, tools are needed to enable users to quickly sort through and review their email. The exemplary email managers described herein assist these users in the task of finding and organizing valuable emails amidst “noise” created by grey mail and junk email in an inbox.
An exemplary email manager provides an interface tool that presents new email to a user in categories. In one implementation an exemplary email manager is a wizard-like tool that clears a displayed inbox, sub-divides a user's mail into categories, prioritizes the categories according to importance, and then displays the categories of email one at a time in order of importance to provide manageable segments. The importance of a category and thus the importance of individual emails can be assigned by the user, i.e., the recipient of the email, so that the recipient is not subject to the sender's conception of importance. An email that the sender designates “low importance” may be presented to the recipient in the highest importance category, and vice versa. By dividing a large inbox into smaller, logical groups the recipient is able to quickly review and process the mail. In one implementation, an email manager categorizes and prioritizes only newly received unread mail, while in other implementations an email manager processes an entire inbox.
In one implementation, priority of display is based on pre-established importance criteria as established beforehand by the recipient, for example, the importance of the sender, or the importance of certain content in a received email. Typical categories based on the importance of a sender may include: serious business mail, such as official email from an email service provider; mail from personal contacts, such as the members of one's address book; interesting mail from entities recognized as safe, i.e., mail sent from organizations the user has recognized as “safe” by adding the organizations to their safe list; mail set to discussion “mail” lists or pulled automatically via RSS news feeds or other aggregation services; and “other” mail including junk mail and spam. These various importance categories can assist a user to digest email in an organized manner. In a sequence, the user can check for official and serious business mail that may include critical information about the user's email account or privacy policies; then read mail from contacts in the user's address book; then read mail from senders on the user's safe list; then browse mail received from subscriptions; and finally process junk mail.
Email importance may be based on email content instead of type of sender. Content criteria may be used separately from sender importance criteria or in conjunction with sender importance criteria. For example, in one implementation newly received emails may be sorted into categories according to content without regard to the sending source. If the user has an interest in “race cars,” for instance, then emails containing race car content will be given high importance and displayed with priority. In another implementation, both sender importance and content importance are used to sort email into displayable categories. For example, in one implementation, new emails are first categorized by importance of the sender, and then if the emails sorted into any one category reach a certain threshold number, then the emails in that category are further sorted by content so that within a category the most important emails are displayed first.
In one implementation, an exemplary email manager 200 can be configured prior to use and further tuned and “trained” during ongoing use. A user can manually configure importance categories and the priority of their display, e.g., using the category generator 304 and the category prioritizer 306. A user may also manually designate email addresses from the address books 310, safe lists 320, and mailing lists 322 to be used as sorting criteria by the trainable filters 312. Thus user-selected addresses can function as rules for directing emails to the proper importance categories. Besides relying on pre-existing addresses from an address book 310 or a sender list 318, a UI 202 of an exemplary email manager 200 may also allow a user to directly enter or import new contact names, that is, email addresses of senders to be used in directing emails to proper importance categories.
In one implementation, when a user first attempts to open an exemplary email manager 200 the user is prompted to set up an account to increase usefulness. For example, by building the user's address books 310 and setting up email rules for the trainable filters 312 the user can increase the manageability of an ongoing email load. In other implementations, importance categories, priorities, and rules for the trainable filters 312 are predetermined or partly predetermined.
An exemplary email manager 200 can sometimes use existing tools of an email application to search a user's mailbox for addresses to add to the address book. The user may also be prompted to add frequent email senders to a safe list.
When content is used as a rule or criteria for directing email to importance categories, content filters 316 can work independently or in conjunction with sender filters 314, which are based on the importance of the sending source. For example, a user might turn off the sender filters 314 entirely and maintain an inbox that prioritizes new email in categories based solely on a designated content. If the user has designated “race car” content as important, then the most important category might contain email directly relating to “race cars” while the second most important categories might contain only references to “cars” or automotive topics.
Importance categories can also be designated according to multiple content topics. For example, “race cars” might be selected as the most important category, followed by “mortgage news,” “world hunger,” and “sailing.” Such multiple content filtering can be used as the primary prioritization scheme to generate importance categories or can be used secondarily within a single category of another primary prioritization hierarchy, e.g., prioritization by importance of the sender.
A content filter 316 by which the email sorter 308 directs emails to importance categories can be a rule, criterion, condition, etc., or may possess more sophisticated characteristics. In one implementation, a content filter 316 prioritizes emails by performing a string search for the selected content on the subject line and/or the body of each email. For example, a user who subscribes to several racing car news feeds may select the word “racing” as a content criterion for directing emails to importance categories because the word “racing” will likely occur in numerous emails. However, a content filter 316 is not limited to a few lines of programming logic. In one implementation, a data mining software robot that uses hundreds of logic comparisons and artificial intelligence algorithms is used as a content filter 316 to distinguish junk mail, such as home equity loan advertisements, from valuable mail, such as a home equity account statement from a user's bank.
When the two types of trainable filters (i.e., 314 and 316) are combined, a user can sort email by sender and also by content. This can be accomplished simultaneously or in sequence. For example, a user can specify that incoming email be categorized by importance of sender, and then within one or more categories, sorted by importance of content. The latter sort by content is useful in importance categories that are likely to contain many emails. For example, a mailing list importance category 210 is likely to have a great number of emails with diverse content. An unknown senders importance category 212 is also likely to have a great number of emails with diverse content.
A user can keep adding senders for inclusion in an importance category. For example, the user might decide to include billing reminders from credit cards, utility companies, etc., in the category of highest importance.
At block 802, importance categories for dividing incoming email into manageable segments are established. The importance categories, however, are united and immediately accessible to a user through a persistently accessible UI 202 that allows instant switching of display between categories. In one implementation, emails from multiple importance categories are shown on a user's display at once, if there are few enough emails. Otherwise, each importance category containing only associated emails is displayed one at a time for manageability.
Importance categories may be preprogrammed in some exemplary email managers 200 while other exemplary email managers 200 allow a user to manually select the importance categories and their relative priority.
At block 804, received emails are arranged into the importance categories. An email sorter 308 may utilize trainable filters 312 to direct incoming email to the various established importance categories. Since the trainable filters 312 are dynamic, new and additional sorting criteria can be added during ongoing use of an exemplary email manager 200. For example, an importance category relying on a user's address book 310 can scale to the changing size of the address book 310.
At block 806, the importance categories are displayed in an order of importance. For example, the importance categories may be displayed as a hierarchical tree UI 202, in which a user can select a node on the tree to display emails gathered under a particular importance category. The emails in any one given category may also be displayed in a secondary order of importance, e.g., prioritized according to a content criterion whereas the importance category in which the secondary sorting takes place may have been prioritized according to a different importance criterion.
The subject matter described above can be implemented in hardware, in software, or in firmware, or in any combination of hardware, software, and firmware. In certain implementations, the subject matter may be described in the general context of computer-executable instructions, such as program modules, being executed by a computing device or communications device. Generally, program modules include routines, programs, objects, components, data structures, etc. that perform particular tasks or implement particular abstract data types. The subject matter can also be practiced in distributed communications environments where tasks are performed over wireless communication by remote processing devices that are linked through a communications network. In a wireless network, program modules may be located in both local and remote communications device storage media including memory storage devices.
The foregoing discussion describes exemplary email managers. Although the subject matter has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological acts, it is to be understood that the subject matter defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or acts described above. Rather, the specific features and acts described above are disclosed as example forms of implementing the claims.
