The problem with email is it's just too general of a means of sending information to human beings. Spam filters are great, but I get a lot more kinds of email than just spam and non-spam. I get emails from my family, emails from automated systems at school, emails from daily deal sites, emails from my bank, and emails from my employer. Also, sometimes, I get spam from my family. Am I the only one who hates the fact that all these things go into the same place? I know roughly what time of day Groupon emails go out, and when I feel my phone vibrate at that time I tend to ignore it. The fact that I've subconsciously developed a mental filter on my phone notifications means that somebody's doin' it wrong.
I'm not trying to pick on Groupon; it's a great service, but the signal-to-noise ratio seems to be getting pretty bad. Bad enough that I'm really pretty torn about whether to unsubscribe, or attempt to train my spam filter to distinguish useful and useless Groupon deals. (Speaking of useless Groupon offers: I'm pretty sure Groupon knows my gender, so why do I get SOOOO MANY day spa, tanning, massage, and pedicure type offers?)
GMail's priority inbox is a step in the right direction, but why not just apply the pattern recognition it uses to an arbitrary number of "mailboxes" instead of having to set up highly specific rules or filters. Don't tell me the same system that recognizes spam can't also differentiate all the "daily deal" emails everyone gets and spin them off to a daily deals folder automatically. Also, don't tell me to set up mail filters or rules. It can and should be easier than that. It should be zero set-up, just like spam filtering. I shouldn't have to decide what I want the categories to be, either. They should just appear, based on what kind of stuff I'm getting. Emails are highly archetypal.
And imagine if some smartphone OS producer (that also happens to be an email service provider with a nifty little superset of IMAP) used this classification system to automagically modify the notification behavior of their smartphone email clients based on how a particular message gets classified. I want my phone to vibrate when my mom emails me. I don't want it to vibrate when Groupon emails me. Heck, I don't even want Groupon mail to show up in the little red number in the Mail.app icon. But I don't want to flag Groupon as spam either. Cuz Groupon isn't spam. It's useful. Just not THAT useful.
On the other hand, maybe it's not such a bad thing that all this email goes to the same place. Imagine Siri a couple years from now, where she reads my emails and tells me when I've got a bill to pay. Or that Groupon has a sweet deal that doesn't involve some kind of massage or spa treatment. If we want to live in a world where we have humble personal assistants, it's certainly going to be useful for them to "know" things about us. I suspect that data-mining the fire hose of information that comes into my email account is going to be a lot better way for Siri to learn about me than trying to standardize some kind of API for app developers to talk to Siri. Not that an API is an inherently bad idea, it's just a bad idea to let the app developers have too much say in what it means for Siri to be "personal." They already get to do that with my email box, and Groupon is a perfect example of why that's a problem.
Another perk: the only company that might be able to claim IP ownership over a method or technique for data mining email is, thankfully, the one company out of the three-and-a-half players in the smartphone world that's not likely to be a patent bully.
