Comments on: Microsoft experimenting with a pause button for incoming e-mail

There's a new way for you to put a pause in your daily grind: The e-mail prioritzer enables you to stop getting new e-mails, and sort out the stuff that's already there.

[bartszyszka]

Shouldn't it be called a "procrastinate button"? If you pause it now and it doesn't actually disable your email for that period of time, it's just delaying when the avalanche will come in...

[Riquez-001]

This is a pretty bad idea, in effect its simulating what would happen if you had a bad email server that was slow to deliver email.
Say an important email from your boss comes in that needs dealing with right away, you dont get it for another 2 hours, perhaps you already went home by then.
Asking for trouble.

Setting up rules to filter mail into folders is already a much better solution - you can see you have 57 customer emails to deal with later & you dont miss out the important things.

[ballmerisanape]

perhaps microsoft should patch all the XP SP1 and below spam mail zombies that are sending the majority of the worlds spam email.. that might cut back on the crap a little.... I know designing an OS with consumers and the internet in mind was a low priority for Microsoft.. but.. .. awww.. nevermind...

[lukepuplett]

Having virtual credits and charging per recipient is my preferred method. The problem is with office culture and the ease in which we can increase the audience of our 'productivity' by emailing lots of people all day long (and sometimes as late in the working day as we can).

We need to be motivated to pinpoint the precise people that benefit from our communications, and not lazily scattershot a load of tenuous stakeholders. I need to be forced to go to my boss to explain why I spent all my credits.

[t26l]

sounds innovative

[t26l]

Wow, smart idea from Microsoft!

e-mail distraction is a real serious problem and this might be a good solution. Also detailed proritisation seems like godsent for people with overflowing mailboxes.

[sadchild]

gay

[devahaz]

My view is that email prioritization is important, but only one of many elements required to really help people deal with their email overload problems. Just wrote a blog post comparing this to our ClearContext Personal product here: http://blog.clearcontext.com/2008/08/microsoft-offic.html

[haggie2]

Huh? I thought there was a "pause" button built into all my Microsoft applications. If there isn't, why do they run so slow?