Gmail: delay send (or, Lucy and Ethel in the Chocolate Factory)

Gmail

For the inaugural non-introductory post, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss an application likely to be used by nearly all readers, and deservedly so: Gmail.

The main purpose of this blog is to offer constructive criticism both of specific applications and of general software trends, so I'll generally only go into what works in applications in order to offer contrast and suggestions for aspects that don't work. To that end, I will forego for now an extensive discussion of Gmail and just say that I think it is one of the finest examples of current software and web design. The interface offers sophisticated functionality, yet manages to be extremely clean and intuitive. And all this with a level of robustness -- both cross-browser compatibility and resilience to crashes and bugs -- so remarkable that you take it completely for granted until you use other Web 2.0 apps.

That said, there is always room for improvement (and that aside from a couple bugs that I've noticed and reported to the proper authorities, as any responsible citizen should). In this post I'll consider the one that is particularly important.

Technology Mitigating Technology

In general, I have some worry about the blinding pace of technological progress today. Although there are endless new gadgets and services that give us valuable new abilities, many of these also deprive us of important aspects of living, in ways that can be difficult to recognize in the midst of that enamoration with the new. This is particularly true of many new internet technologies, which give us a level of anxiety at being constantly connected and having our attention demanded and our time obligated by feeds and overflowing inboxes.

However, sometimes technology can be used to mitigate its own ill effects. One of the reasons I switched to Gmail from my clunky old mail client, Eudora, was the prospect of spending less time managing my mail. One way Gmail facilitates this is by making mailboxes optional (giving you a 'filter' option instead). Now when I'm done with a message, instead of having to figure out which of the hundreds of mailboxes I'd accumulated to put it in, I simply archive it, and can easily find it later with the powerful and intuitive search function.

No feeling is more rare, longed after, and fleetingly blissful for the modern than the serenity of an empty inbox.

Gmail made leaps and bounds in this direction with its archive feature. It made it even better with the currently-experimental "Send & Archive" feature (which you can enable in Labs). When you're done replying to a message, you can send it, archive the thread, and get back to your inbox with the single click of a button:

Glorious.

Delay Send

But there's a problem. Whether I'm responding to many emails at once, or replying to an email as soon as I get it, it's often the case that I simply want to write my response and clear it out of my inbox. But to do that, I have to send it immediately, which will prompt the recipient to think I'm available to keep quickly responding. Typically when I respond to 20 messages, by the time I'm done, I already have new replies to five of them. Unless this is a time-sensitive issue, or a series of short interchanges, I'd often rather write my response and just have it sent some time later.

The advantages are obvious: email stays just as fast and useful as you as you need it to be, but not so fast as to make you into Lucy and Ethel in the Chocolate Factory. When you're reducing the rate at which you send messages, you'll reduce the rate at which you receive them. You can choose to get a message replied to and off of your mind, and know that you won't need to deal with it again until you've decided to. It will allow for the ethic of immediately dealing with messages -- something I strive for simply for the purposes of time-management and sanity -- without the need to further the ever-increasing pace of communication. This would also be useful for concealing from professional contacts the ridiculous hours at which I respond to emails.

So, my proposal to you, dear Gmail, is to add a little "Delay Send" button next to the Send button. It could have a default setting -- say, 6 hours -- and a dropdown menu to offer other delays and specific times.

Why They Haven't Done It (But Should)

I am certainly not the first to suggest this feature. It's been floating around their suggestion forums for a while. There are a number of potential problems, mostly the possibility of being abused for spam and denial of service attacks. The scenario is simple: someone sets up a hundred accounts and queues each to send ten thousand messages to the same recipient at the same time. They then successfully crash the recipient's mail account and server, and do some harm to Gmail's own servers and reputation.

There are similar spamming concerns. And you can imagine some more bizarre scenarios: someone decides to go on a rampage or kill themselves, and sets Gmail to send suicide or revenge notes after they do it.

The techniques for averting these possibilities are pretty straightforward: simply limit the number of messages a user can queue, the length between subsequent messages to be sent, and the time they can be delayed for being sent. I would think it would be reasonable to impose limits of, say, no more than 100 messages in the queue at a time, no more than one sent per minute (those queued to send at the same time would just have to wait a few extra minutes), and no more than a week allowed for a message to sit in the queue. These, or even more conservative limits, would certainly be sensible to implement when the feature is in the experimental phase, and could be tweaked as necessary. It's hard to foresee much harm that could come with such limits imposed.

You can even imagine some additional benefits that might come from such a system. I, for example, can certainly appreciate the appeal of running off into the wilderness for a while without telling anyone where you're going or even that you're going at all. But in case something goes wrong and you don't want to have to amputate your arm and drink your own urine, you might set a message to send not long after you intend to return, asking someone to send help, and then just delete it if you do return as expected.

The only other objection I can think to is a perceived level of disrespect that might come from thinking that someone sent you a delayed message. You couldn't entirely trust the times you saw on the messages anymore. Maybe someone has deemed you second-class and delayed you for fear of excess of conversation. Or maybe the opposite might happen too. (I can see it now: "He emailed you two days after your date? That sounds good -- he was interested but not overeager. Ooh, or maybe he wrote it as soon as he got home and just delayed it!") But I wouldn't anticipate using this for any personal messages (the sort of thing some people still quaintly drop in the mailbox) or matters of urgency. On the whole, the harmony brought about by empty inboxes with staunched inlets would make this feature usher in a new era of tranquility in human history.