6 - Today, tomorrow, this week, no hurry.

Expectation setting comes up all the time when we talk about email as it is today.

When you send an email and you do not receive a reply, should you be worried?

If you receive an email, but don't reply right away, is the sender feeling anxious?

This anxiety often manifests as the familiar email that reads: 'Just bumping this to the top of your inbox'.

We are working on a solution to expectation setting, as the title of this update suggests, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this approach.

Setting an Expectation

Our vision is for both senders and receivers to be able to set an expectation on any given email.

Say you send a non-urgent email, tick the 'no hurry' box before you send and that expectation will be communicated to the recipient.

Say you receive a particularly urgent sounding email and you want to let the sender know you are working on it right now, mark the expectation as 'today'.

We have tried to distill this concept into a simple, deliverable feature. Do you think you would use expectation setting like this or another way?

Crossed Paths

Expectation setting could potentially be quite powerful in terms of bringing more order and control to the inbox generally.

If users employ good etiquette with expectation setting we can hope to eliminate those emails that cross over eachother. You know, the ones where you're writing a reply but while you're writing it, another email pops in.

Expectation setting is like a blinker (or indicator) on your car that you use to signal your manouvre before you actually make the turn allowing others to act according to your intentions.

Making this work

For Plum Mail users emailing other Plum Mail users, we can deliver this functionality similar to sharing a thumbs up response to an instant message.

As we start to build out the Plum Email Client, we think we can include an expectation in the header of the email and inside the body of the email.

Just to manage your expectations, this feature is currently in development. If you would like to be involved in testing an early release, please do let us know.

Cheers, Peter & Richard

p.s. If you have a friend who you think would be interested in our journey, please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)