The Wall St. Journal today reported on a number of software products that could be added to email to enhance security. Here are the features I want most:
* Smart Threading
Since I won't read a Blackberry during meetings, when I come back to my office at the end of a day, there can be 200 new emails in my inbox. Often, there will be many emails on a single topic. Yes, I can sort by subject line, but I want more.
At the end of a long day, I don't want the inefficiency of opening and closing all the "me too" responses. It is already technically possible to have the software figure out the unique text from emails with the same subject line and let me read just the unique text and relevant headers on one screen. Then, I want to be able to respond as appropriate to any iteration and file all the copies at once.
Later iterations would be smart enough to pick out same subject emails with new subject lines and new subject emails that just keep using an old subject line.
* Recipient Tags
At work, I often send the same email to a group of people but I don't want the same thing from all of them. For one recipient it may be a work assignment, for another it's just an "FYI."
About a year ago, I experimented with beginning every subject line with an all capital letter tag indicating why it was relevant to the recipient and got very positive feedback. They could look at their inboxes and know what was due today, next Friday, and what could be put off to the someday pile. It was a lot of work, though, since I had to send separate copies of the email to each recipient.
* Social Network Security
At work or at home, I'm willing to share certain confidential information with certain people. After thinking about it a while, I realized that those groups of people generally end up on email copy counts. For example, people working on the same project get copies of material and drafts about the project. People who get pictures of my last vacation always get pictures of my vacations. So, why not be able to use the social network analysis of my email to identify the appropriate group with whom to share?
The technology already exists to give me an easy-to-understand and easy-to-manipulate drawing of my groups of contacts. So, how about something that lets me establish access permissions with two clicks - one click on a network and one click on a file folder or directory?
Later iterations could notice when a network changes (someone leaves the company and drops off of cc lists) and ask if you want to change corresponding permissions.
(date of blog altered; original 2006 prior to 5/1)