Inbox480 – My Personal Story: Part I
It all started with a client.
To begin with, his IT manager had told him that 92% of his incoming email was spam and was filtered out before it ever reached his inbox. So my client never saw more than ninety percent of his incoming volume.
What my client found even more astonishing was that among the things that did reach him, he considered at least eighty percent of it “quasi-spam” — newsletters, articles and press releases, vendors trolling for new projects, social media, etc. — things that vied for his attention but were, more often than not, unwanted and unimportant.
Implications: In his unfiltered mail, out of every 100 messages he was being sent, fewer than two were essential.
So even with a spam filter, on a daily basis my client had to wade through and ultimately delete eighty percent of his email. That’s a lot of decision-making and clicking for no return. — I asked him:
Why don’t you just unsubscribe from these senders instead of deleting them all the time?
Well, he said, every once in a while a vendor or newsletter — or even a LinkedIn group — has something interesting to say. I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
So I said to him: Sounds like you could use a new inbox that only your essential senders could get into.
Exactly, he said.
That got me thinking. I was pretty sure that others had that same problem, so we commenced work on our latest solution, Inbox480. The inbox for 80 percent of your mail.
