Email — your friendly neighbourhood Analytics reporting platform (Part 2)
In part 1, we discussed the shortcomings of the visualization and analytics platforms
Emails are the road most travelled and yet relegated to being horse and cart worthy only. There is some reasoning for that.
For one, checking your email is both an exciting and heart pounding adventure every morning (and then at every 2 minute intervals during the day) because it is the primary and authenticated source of organizational plans and news — Good or bad. Mostly bad, but it does not stop the average human being to keep refreshing their screens hoping the next message would overwrite the shock and awe of the many received earlier.
The legitimacy and legality of an email is however revived every single time confirming that you have ‘received’, ‘seen’ and ‘stored’ the message. There have been moves to shift this over to places like Slack and teams, however the general feeling is that those platforms are too informal and would not stand in the ‘figurative’ court of law.
Therefore, in the email world, claiming not having seen/received an email to a fellow colleague or the management or the town municipality is akin to denying sunrise — You could for analogy purposes do it (say you did not see the sun for this many days) if you are up in Arvidsjaur, Sweden however they would still tell you to check if it might have been behind a mountain or a tree blocking the view or just move south to find it. The point being, finding the sun once it has risen or an email once it has been sent to your correct email address is your problem — not the senders.
Then, emails once received are yours — you look at them again and again if it is the bearer of a good news like a grand job offer or shy away if its in response to your online tax subscription. In all cases, it sits there looking at you whether you are looking at it or not.
Third and probably better than worse in most cases, the emails never go away — Even the bad ones if they stay long enough, they are a reference to the past and therefore a guarantee of some sort that you can bring forth in someone’s face and say, A-HA! got you! (well be careful with that — this strategy backfires a lot)
For all these reasons and maybe more, your outlook or mail client is ignored when it comes to the sexy stuff these days — but not today!
In part 3, we show the actual implementation
