Email length detection / limiting / auto responders

[bnvk]

Composing
Provide UI feedback to people when composing an email:

"This email is the perfect length. Send it."
"Hey that email is quite long. The ideal length is about 4 - 8 sentences."
"Are you sure you want to send an email that long?"

"Based on previous conversations, your message is 10 sentences longer than that which the recipient usually sends to you. Consider shortening your message." [data_based_ui_guide]

Receiving
On the receiving messages side, an auto responder could auto reply to people who have sent you really long emails with messages like:

"Hey thanks for your email. I've probably read by now, but don't expect a reply as your message was about 4 paragraphs longer than what I usually reply to ~Brennan's Mailpile" [data_based_response]

"Whoa there buddy, does your mama know you actually send emails that long?" [custom_response]

Sources for inspiration:
http://www.fastcompany.com/3014857/leadership-now/why-every-email-should-be-5-sentences-long
http://www.fastcompany.com/3013894/leadership-now/why-your-emails-get-replies-or-dont
http://five.sentenc.es

[gunniho]

Love this! Could also go a step further and calculate how long it will take you to read the text;
"4 min read"
"This email will take you 8 minutes to read"

[bnvk]

@gunniho precisely ;)

[esijg]

I must say that would make my e-mail program sound a bit like a "mother" in a negative way. I do agree that e-mails should be short in most use cases but sometimes I write e-mails to friends far away that are more similar to how you would write a paypal. In those cases a lot of information needs to be displayed and also a reply is not important.

Another solution would be to use subtler feedback or hints when you go over "optimal length" of e-mails. Like for example, text becoming slightly red for couple of seconds and then fades back to regular color once the program has realized that the user really wants to write a long e-mail.

...or we could just force a Twitter letter count limit. ;)

PS: This still sounds like a good idea for an optional opt-in plugin.

[smari]

@johannesgunnar, yes, I think this would have to be optional, but it's a feature a lot of people would probably appreciate. It's also one of those things that comes as a natural affordance of having a super fast search engine, so a lot of people are going to enjoy making things like that. I don't know how many of them deserve to be active by default, but "sensible defaults" is a great idea.

[WhyNotHugo]

If this were a mailing list, instead of an issuetracker, the initial post would have been an email.
It would have triggered all those "too long" indicators, and gotten autoreplies.

It's a clear example of why that "all mail should be 4-5 sentences" idea is stupid. Sure, if it's a casual mail to a friend that's ok. Buy plenty of work or developement stuff is a lot longer than that. (like half of the comments on this very thread, for example).

[maffblaster]

@brennannovak I like the read time calculation. Such a good idea! "This message will take about 5 mins to to read." Implement that!

[bnvk]

@maffblaster cool- thanks for the feedback and nudge. I've moved this issue to the Plugins milestone. Hopefully an enthusiastic community member will help hack on it. Otherwise, I'll see what I can do after our beta, but no promises ;)