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Ideally, Your Email Would Expire in 5 ... 4 ... 3 ...
02/15/11
By Ken Magill
Joshua Baer is on a mission.
The founder and CEO of OtherInbox wants marketers to be able to include expiration dates in their email headers.
After the emails expired, the receiving ISP would take some sort of automatic action, such as delete the expired messages or put them into a special folder.
However, Baer’s main challenge is getting widespread adoption.
He contends email with expiration dates would be especially useful for marketers who send out daily deals. However, he added, the mechanism would contain benefits for all marketers.
“The overriding thing is it’s going to create a better user experience, which benefits everyone,” he said. “Obviously, if email isn’t relevant anymore, it’s a better user experience if the user never sees it.”
In order to get his plan implemented, he’s got to get a critical-mass of marketers to begin including a line of code in their email headers. People in both the sender and receiver camps are open to the idea, he said, but one group has to take the lead.
“It is a chicken-and-egg problem,” he said. “Everybody is like, ‘I’ll do it if you do it, well, I’ll do it if you do it. Invariably in these types of situations, it’s been the senders who have acted first.”
If enough marketers add the code, Baer said, ISPs will begin to recognize and act on it.
Baer overcame a similar challenge in 2006 when he led the charge to get ISPs to include an unsubscribe button in their inbox user interfaces. He expects this effort to pan out similarly.
“There’s a tipping point where I can go to Yahoo! and say: ‘Hey look, you’ve got a bunch of messages in your mailboxes right now that are already clearly marked as no longer relevant. Why don’t you help you users out and do something about it?’” he said. “The reason why as a sender you want to do this is you’ll get fewer spam complaints, better deliverability and make more money.”
For example, Baer said, expiration dates would eliminate possible scenarios such as people opening their inboxes after days of inactivity, seeing a bunch of old emails from one mailer, deciding that mailer is sending too much and lodging a spam complaint.
“No one is going to click ‘this is spam’ on a message that has expired,” he said. “It’s been well documented that people who click ‘this is spam’ often don’t even know why they’re doing it.”
According to Baer, what would happen to expired emails would vary from ISP to ISP.
“Most of the time it would either get deleted or put into an ‘expired’ folder,” he said. “In the case of Gmail, which has some unique features, you could archive it instead of deleting it.”
And while marketers would be able to include an expiration date, they would not be able to dictate what happens when the email expires, said Baer.
“It will never be up to the marketer,” he said. “It will be up to the mailbox provider.”
For more information go to X-Expires on Google Groups or follow the discussion on Twitter.
Comments
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Date: 2011-02-20 09:36:19
Subject: Does X-Expires indicate spam? About as much as List-Unsubscribe does.
Jaeson - its funny but I remember people saying the same thing about List-Unsubscribe. It didn't turn out that way though.
Date: 2011-02-18 10:35:15
Subject: Great Idea
Great idea. Please implement this on outbound marketing mail as soon as possible so I can use that X-header to filter that crap out of my inbox.
“It’s been well documented that people who click ‘this is spam’ often don’t even know why they’re doing it.” Hahaha Riiiight. Why am I clicking on this random button over here? I have no idea. Look over there, a pony!!!!
Date: 2011-02-18 09:31:40
Subject: this is all about the users
J.D. makes it sound like somehow I'm going to personally benefit and make a lot of money off the X-Expires proposal. It couldn't be farther from the truth. I'm not responsible for sending any email marketing messages, my desire for this is as a user that wants the feature for my own mailbox.
Just like when I co-authored the List-Unsubscribe standard in 1998, my interest is in improving the overall email ecosystem for me as a user. List-Unsubscribe was not created for marketing emails, it was created for mailing list emails. It turned out it was very helpful for marketing emails too and that was a benefit to both users and marketers.
There are lots of emails I get that are not marketing emails that I think should expire. The one that bugs me the most are all of the automated reports and alerts I get from servers. But there are more.
As John pointed out, this is not "Josh's idea". Many others have contributed to this as well, I'm just picking up the torch.
I've talked to dozens of end-users about this and so far the response is overwhelmingly positive.
I've talked to a handful of mailbox providers, and all of them seem to agree that less spam complaints and smaller inboxes is better for users, better for mailbox providers, and better for senders. win-win-win
I got out of the email sending business 5 years ago. Since then, I've been focused on developing solutions for users to better manage their mailbox. So far, I've worked with almost 1 million users and learned a lot about their needs. This proposal comes from a desire to improve the situation for the user, not the marketer.
As John said, there is no downside. If a spammer wants to use this, all it will do is make his email go away faster. I don't think its going to help him make any more money.
Date: 2011-02-17 21:24:56
Subject: you all forgot someone, again
It's obvious how this idea benefits marketers, and if I squint my eyes and tilt my head for a while I can maybe come up with a way it benefits mailbox providers, sorta.
What about users? How does Josh's idea benefit them, outside of the marketing context?
Date: 2011-02-16 02:53:29
Subject: Great Email Developments
Thanks for the nice read Ken, I also recently wrote an article about developments in email marketing and time-sensitive messages were one of the points I mentioned. It really is a fantastic concept and if it can be developed effectively there is no doubt that marketers will jump on board and utilize the function. As you mentioned, it will greatly benefit UX. Thanks again.
Date: 2011-02-15 17:35:57
Subject: A simple optimization
I certainly hope Josh goes ahead with X-Expires. The obvious thing to do with it is to save time and discard any mail with that header as soon as it arrives.
FYI, this is not a new idea. Usenet has had an Expires: header for decades. It wasn't useful there, either.
Date: 2011-02-15 17:34:39
Subject: The user should always be able to opt-out and be in control
Bill, I think there should always be a way that a user can opt-out and say "never touch expired messages". Different ISPs could have different implementations too. One might put them in the trash folder, another might put them in a special "Expired" folder. Still others might choose to "Archive" them. If there is a "Priority Inbox" then expired messages should never show up there.
Date: 2011-02-15 16:01:24
Subject: as long as we can opt out of using it
I don't like the idea of my emails being moved or deleted without my consent. What if I wanted to archive deals I get in emails to check back on them later, but instead they are getting automatically deleted or even moved to a location I don't want?
In Gmail, I didn't like how Priority Inbox works and instead I use filters to control my Inbox how I prefer.
Facebook also sorts the News Feed in a way that leaves out many posts that I would like so instead I use Lists to control what I see.
Maybe I'm a little bit of a control freak and certainly not the typical user but these type of features never work exactly how I would like and I would just rather take care of it myself.
Date: 2011-02-15 15:18:28
Subject: Push it out through ESPs
Whether people know what they're doing or not when they hit "spam", the fact remains that if subscribers see only new/current (and therefore the most relevant) messages, they're likely to have a better view of the sender.
In any case, Baer might be able to implement it by bringing it to many of the ESPs (or creating apps for it that integrate with their systems). They can push it to their customers and clients and bam - ISPs will be seeing it all over the place
Date: 2011-02-15 14:56:16
Subject: "Well documented?"
I would challenge Mr. Baer to provide this wellspring of documentation. I'd easily counter it with the two years of professional end-user experience survey's MAAWG undertook that showed very clearly and precisely that they know full-well what they are doing when they hit the 'this is spam' button. Some folks logs in infrequently. An unwanted message, despite it having been delivered in the past, doesn't make it any less unwanted.
See:
http://www.maawg.org/sites/maawg/files/news/2010_MAAWG-Consumer_Survey.pdf
and
http://www.maawg.org/sites/maawg/files/news/2009_MAAWG-Consumer_Survey-Part1.pdf
and
http://www.maawg.org/sites/maawg/files/news/2009_MAAWG-Consumer_Survey-Part2.pdf