Right now, I can hire someone to reorganize my house. Within the next few years, there will be, similarly, people who offer to reorganize their customer's email.
They will set up folders for your different e-mail conversations, and configure your e-mail client to automatically add messages to those folders. They will also set up your spam filtering, and make sure that any naive bayesian networks are primed to react to your specific topics. They will know which businesses you have given your email to, and will make sure that communications from those businesses pass through your spam filters and are filed appropriately. They will also set up forwarding systems; they will produce a simple list of all the different accounts you have, and their passwords, and will set up forwarding from those accounts into one, or parallel access from those accounts into your client. They will be able to set up cryptographic accounts, and make sure that you have your keys and your signing certificates in order.
After an initial consultation, there will be occasional follow-up visits where the system is tuned towards your preferences.
The name for them, as well as their business's names, will use puns on maid, cleaning, secretarial, or medical services.-- jutta, Jan 26 2006 Bill Gates gets 4m emails/day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_GatesI imagine he has a team of people to organise his Inbox [hippo, Jan 26 2006] Do they do desktops/MyDocs/Home folders as well?-- yamahito, Jan 26 2006 This would be great - I worry that it might be prohibitively expensive though: To sort out my email folders at work would require reading tens of thoudands of emails. I think there's also an analogy with web content searching - Yahoo! went down the path of organising stuff based on neat semantic categorisations of the world whereas Google went for powerful and clever mechanical searching. Google won because mechanical searching gets you 90% of the benefits that expert categorisation gives you but at a fraction of the cost. In the same way people stick with their disorganised email systems because most of the time they can find the email they want and the cost (in their time or in employing email serfs to come and sort your stuff out) would be too great."eMail Grooming Consultants"-- hippo, Jan 26 2006 ...and they will be between the ages of nine and fourteen.-- moomintroll, Jan 26 2006 [jutta] in a less sophisticated form - perhaps I mean a less technologically up to date form - this is what most 'powerful' people already have through the use of e-mail delegates, a function that has rapidly become one of the most important skills for a PA to have. If you are processing any of your own e-mail on a salary above $180K, it's a waste of your company's time.
I suspect that 'celebrities' are also provided with something like this service by ISPs / web hosting companies.-- ConsulFlaminicus, Jan 26 2006 "Web Serfing"-- yamahito, Jan 27 2006 I don't need this service yet, but sure sounds like some people could.
Hey, nice work on that title suggestion, [yamahito].-- half, Jan 27 2006 random, halfbakery