# Still looking for a smarter inbox

By [The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman](https://paragraph.com/@nickgrossman) · 2013-01-30

tech-design-internet, wanted

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I am bad at email.  Maybe everyone is.  But I feel like I’m worse than most; or at least worse than I want to be. I feel like my inbox should do a better job helping me find emails that are important.  I use Gmail and Priority Inbox, so I don’t mean “important” in that sense (emails from close contacts). By important, I mean things like:

1.  Conversations where “the ball is in my court” (hard to discern programmatically perfectly)
    
2.  Conversations that I initiated — then the person wrote back — but then I didn’t write back to (similar to #1 but easier to identify, and more important)
    
3.  Emails that I have not responded to yet at all
    
4.  Emails from important people, where important takes into account other data such as: twitter followers (total, in common), linkedin connection, etc.
    
5.  probably a few other smart ways I’m not thinking of right now.
    

I have been thinking about this a bit after reading somewhere (I think in Venture Deals) that Brad Feld and his partners read and respond to every inbound email every day.  That’s pretty impressive. I am not there yet.  But I like the idea a lot.  So today I did set up a little  gmail query to try and help with that: `newer_than:1d and is:important` This gives me a view of all the emails that I received in the last day.  It’s a start. But it’s not perfect. It doesn’t give me is a view of conversations I have not participated in yet.   I tried adding a filter such like: `-from:me`, to try and exclude any threads that I’ve participated in, but that doesn’t do the trick.  So I what I see is a list of all the emails that came in today, including every email I sent.  Which is not what I’m looking for. I complained about this to [Fred](http://twitter.com/fredwilson) the other day, suggesting that there’s still an opportunity to build a product (along the lines of [SaneBox](http://sanebox.com) or [Gmail Meter](http://gmailmeter.com)) that really solves the inbox problem.  It’s such an important problem for so many people, and it’s still so far from perfect.  His response was that there’s a fear of investing in things that are too close to the core of the email platforms. I am not sure I agree, but it does seem that there still isn’t a perfect solution, so maybe that’s the reason. In summary, I would love to see: a) a simple [gmail query parameter](https://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=7190) that lets me find conversations in which I am not yet a participant (I feel like this must exist!) or b) a smarter view of my inbox — perhaps one that is another kind of visualization besides a list — that takes into account these other important factors.  I’d pay good money for that! **Update:** this query is pretty good: `newer_than:7d is:important in:inbox`

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*Originally published on [The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman](https://paragraph.com/@nickgrossman/still-looking-for-a-smarter-inbox)*