Email length detection / limiting / auto responders about mailpile HOT 7 CLOSED

Love this! Could also go a step further and calculate how long it will take you to read the text;
"4 min read"
"This email will take you 8 minutes to read"

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@gunniho precisely ;)

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I must say that would make my e-mail program sound a bit like a "mother" in a negative way. I do agree that e-mails should be short in most use cases but sometimes I write e-mails to friends far away that are more similar to how you would write a paypal. In those cases a lot of information needs to be displayed and also a reply is not important.

Another solution would be to use subtler feedback or hints when you go over "optimal length" of e-mails. Like for example, text becoming slightly red for couple of seconds and then fades back to regular color once the program has realized that the user really wants to write a long e-mail.

...or we could just force a Twitter letter count limit. ;)

PS: This still sounds like a good idea for an optional opt-in plugin.

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@johannesgunnar, yes, I think this would have to be optional, but it's a feature a lot of people would probably appreciate. It's also one of those things that comes as a natural affordance of having a super fast search engine, so a lot of people are going to enjoy making things like that. I don't know how many of them deserve to be active by default, but "sensible defaults" is a great idea.

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If this were a mailing list, instead of an issuetracker, the initial post would have been an email.
It would have triggered all those "too long" indicators, and gotten autoreplies.

It's a clear example of why that "all mail should be 4-5 sentences" idea is stupid. Sure, if it's a casual mail to a friend that's ok. Buy plenty of work or developement stuff is a lot longer than that. (like half of the comments on this very thread, for example).

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@brennannovak I like the read time calculation. Such a good idea! "This message will take about 5 mins to to read." Implement that!

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@maffblaster cool- thanks for the feedback and nudge. I've moved this issue to the Plugins milestone. Hopefully an enthusiastic community member will help hack on it. Otherwise, I'll see what I can do after our beta, but no promises ;)

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