If E-mail Had a Baby: Notification Messages

I’ve been noticing recently that a lot of my e-mail of late is notification
related. I get a lot of e-mail from applications like Twitter and Facebook
that falls into this category. “Someone added you as their friend”, “X is now
following you”, “There is a new message in your Facebook inbox”, “A photo was
uploaded with you in it”, etc… These messages can normally be expressed in a
single line.

I often sort messages from different web services into their own folders.
Here’s an example of how my Twitter “inbox” looked earlier today:

As you can see, each of these notification messages can be displayed on a
single line. In fact, an entire summary of each e-mail message is expressed in
the subject line.

The Big Idea

So here is my big idea: What if a notification e-mail message like this was
formatted so that it would allow e-mail clients to handle them as a special
case?

This would allow an e-mail client to have a special pane that would show
recent notifications. You could also build rules that would do certain things
when a site sent you a notification. Like download the photo you were last
seen in to a special folder or display a small notification window (like a
Growl notification) or forward the notification to you as an SMS message on
your cell phone.

If the body of the e-mail contained a special part tailored for display, you
could even get a feed view that would look much like Facebook’s news feed
or perhaps your Twitter stream.

Probably the biggest win here in treating notification messages differently is
that normal messages begin to take center stage again. Your inbox would no
longer be filled with notifications from Twitter and Facebook. It would
contain the real stuff you need to deal with for your work or personal life.

The possibilities here are mind boggling. This could change the way we
communicate with each other.

All it would take would be for a major e-mail client like G-mail or Yahoo to
start handling messages this way and promoting the concept.

The Technical Jargon

I’m not familiar enough with the e-mail spec to completely outline how this
should be done, but I do have a couple of suggestions for how this could work
in practice.

First of all, I’d suggest that web services begin marking notification
messages with a special “X-Notification” e-mail header. The header could
include information about whether the message required some action from the
user or not. Other things that could possibly be included here would be flags
that would be read by mail servers as the message is passed along that would
determine the priority that it should be delivered. Lower-priority
notifications would not need to be delivered immediately.

Secondly, I’d suggest that the subject of the message be treated as a one-line
summary of the notification. Web services seem to be doing this already.

Thirdly, I’d also suggest that we add a new alternative part to a MIME encoded
message that would contain the compact rich notification summary suitable for
display in a feed of some kind (I’m thinking HTML here). The new part type is
essential because it would allow messages to be displayed in the new format
only if the e-mail client supported it, whereas older clients could continue
to display them as normal e-mail messages.

So this is my big idea. What do you think?