I was talking with Myk Melez at the Mozilla Summit and as he described for me how he manages his mail, I realized that one of the problems with mail systems today is that we treat them the same way we treat regular mail. When I receive snail mail, I go through the mail, quickly throw away the junk and then probably leave the rest in a stack on the counter where bills are forgotten or coupons expire. Basically I’m picking out the easy stuff to throw away and keeping the rest. This is how most people treat email as well. Junk mail is easy to get rid of, but a lot of stuff just sits in our inbox for no reason. What if we turned this process on its head?

Imagine an inbox where mail that you’ve read disappears from your inbox after say three days. It could be archived or deleted. The only way to keep it from disappearing is to flag it or file it after you read it. You would be forced to make a decision on mail when you receive it (or within three days) and mail you don’t really care about would simply disappear. And your inbox would only contain very new stuff or stuff you deliberately flagged.

This would probably be a fairly straightforward arrangement to setup in gmail, so I think I am going to try it. Once I empty my inbox of course .