Kevin Rose Can’t Keep Up With E-mail; Blaine Cook Can’t Wait To Speak With a Human
Erick Schonfeld
78 comments »
On Friday, I moderated a fun panel at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami (see photo above). The basic premise was to try to come up with a compelling web app in 40 minutes. There were a lot of good ideas, but the best ones centered around communications and how to use technology to get around the frustrations of e-mail and phone calls. It was clear that the panelists think these communication modes that we rely on every day may very well be in the process of breaking down. (CNet’s Caroline McCarthy, who was covering the conference, notes this as well).
A lot of the ideas were about getting around current communications bottlenecks. Leah Culver of Pownce came up with a white pages service that uses SMS text messages to look up phone numbers. Blaine Cook of Twitter suggested creating a call-back service that would, in effect, allow you call companies and put them on hold until a human answered. In other words, you would specify what department you want to speak with at a company, and the software would call and go through the phone tree, and digitally push all the right buttons until it got to a human operator, at which point it would ring your phone. I thought this was brilliant. Update: A service called Bringo actually does exactly this; we covered it last May.
But the app we ended up spending the most time brainstorming was one that Digg’s Kevin Rose dreamed up to help him manage his e-mail. He can’t keep up with it all, and wanted to come up with a way to stop offending people who he never gets back to by sharing some of his e-mail data with them. The concept was a site that keeps stats on your e-mail usage that your friends can check to see how far behind you are in responding to e-mails in general. (”It’s not you, it’s me”).
The stats would show your friends things like how many e-mails you got today, how many you’ve responded to, average response times, etc. When you look at the site, you’d get a deeper view, including alerts on who you are responding to and who you are not (but should be) based on your past e-mail behavior. The way it would know how to prioritize your e-mail would be to figure out your social network based on who you email a lot (similar to what Xobni does for Outlook). It would create alerts like: “Email Mom!” We ended up calling the app Mail Model, per Matt Mullenweg’s suggestion (other name suggestions were Mailr, which is already taken, Mail Stats, and Don’tBeAnEmailJerk.com).
I am not convinced this would actually be a viable service. If I think you are a jerk for not responding to my emails, getting a notice that I am No. 300 in your queue is not going to make me feel any better about you. But I thought the panel was instructive because it points to a problem that is starting to effect everyone, not just Kevin Rose. It’s not just that people are having a hard time keeping up with email. It is that email is having a hard time keeping up with us and our insatiable need for constant communication. If an e-mail falls below the fold, which in my case on Gmail is the last 50 e-mails, it is pretty much lost. And anything more than 48 hours old is a dead conversation.
Why doesn’t email work anymore, and what can be done to fix it?
(Photo via White African)
It should be on a mobile phone and it should be Nimbuzz http://www.nimbuzz.com/
and I can’t keep up with TechCrunch..
We’ve built something that may help in term of user feedback — which may in turn help with de-cluttering email. We call is UserVoice.com - it enables any company or community to have a feedback tool like this, creating a market around good ideas using suggestions & voting them up.
You can check out UserVoice and request your own page (we’re in semi-private beta) at http://example.uservoice.com
Pretty cool idea but in reality, as you said, it doesn’t seem to be a viable service.
I think most problem don’t need software to solve their email problems, but proper discipline.
Create filters in gmail that auto read and archive and label common emails that don’t need a response.
Create autoresponders letting people know that you love them, but it may not be possible to return their mail. If you run a business create a link to a FAQ which lists common questions people might have.
For people that are very popular this software might be good. I’m sure Mike Arrington gets flooded and Kevin Rose, but these guys are celebrities and I don’t think they reflect the average population.
What’s with the hats?
I’ve been hearing these complaints a lot lately, and not from the usual geek or business crowd. A few of my college friends have complained about information overload, and even my Mom has problems with deciding what emails to respond to first since she merges her business and personal account into one. I think that’s a first step. Make sure you keep your business and personal email accounts not only in different accounts, but in different programs so you can focus on one at a time. The other method I use is to send a short message back to people to tell them I’ll try to respond later. These two methods only help so much though.
The worst for me is my cell phone as I just don’t have the time to talk to friends for 30+ minutes throughout so I’ve gotten the reputation of always letting my phone go to voicemail.
heh, the hats.
they we’re a gift from Carsonified, the group that runs FOWA, not sure of the full background of the hats story though.
Looks like hats are back in again…
The email idea is brilliant, but as people have said it would be incredibly hard to implement. I still think there is a good idea there
When you’re a startup founder, every problem looks like it should be solved by a new application, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right answer.
No matter what email client people are using, few of them use the tools on hand to help manage their in-box. Doesn’t matter if it’s filters, tags, folders, or rules — find out what your mail client can do to help you and set up some process. If Gmail isn’t cutting it for you, push your mail into a real email client via IMAP and use the tools there.
I get well over 100 emails a day in my work account and anything from 20 to 100 in my personal account, so I’m not quite as overwhelmed as some folks, but it can still be a lot of information to process on busy days. However, between keeping the accounts separate and applying a handful of filters and tags, I find it very easy to manage the flow.
two comments:
1) the twitter guy’s idea seemed much more interesting and useful to everybody. why didn’t you spend more time on it? was it because kevin rose is more of a “celebrity” or is there another reason?
2) i have a crush on leah culver.
How about starting to move the public (or Publicly oriented) conversations away from e-mail and into whatever the various social software tools available out there that may be common to both parties exchanging e-mails? I have been doing that at work for the last three weeks and so far it has been working really well. So much so that I am starting to apply the same principles to my non related work e-mails… and have reduced quite considerably the number of e-mails I receive on a daily basis…
Blaine Cook’s “brilliant” idea is already a product (and I think it has at least one competitor). I don’t remember the name but I used it this past summer after reading about it here on TC. I’m not even sure what it would be tagged, but think it was in May or June
Ok, I found it:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....l-service/
Michael specifically stated at the end of the post that they needed a mobile version. Not sure if they’ve done that.
We were all given those hats before we took the stage. Forget why, but I ended up giving mine to Matt Marshall for his talk that came next.
@12, we only had 40 minutes, so we had to pick one idea to go with. We let the audience vote. So maybe Kevin did have an advantage there.
And, yes, I am sure all of these ideas exist already in one form or another. That does not mean the problem has been solved.
Do you really want people to know how far down the list they are in your email entourage? Besides if your like me you’ve got a family blog, a personal blog, a twitter account and multiple business related blogs. Give me an app that would allow me to type a blog post and put check mark to each site that it gets published on. That way I only have to manage one upload to multiple locations, I guess you could do the same for email but if you want to get a hold of me then you’ll text me.
bah… i remember when erick first posted about him doing this, i thought.. eh… and i’m still kinda thinking.. eh…
Xobni. Hot inbox organizer of the hour… why should a panel of innovators and a journalist be talking about an inbox related app? (stress *talking about*)
I don’t know… i guess i’d enjoy if it i saw a vid. of it all the same. But it doesn’t make very exciting reading. Especially considering this whole thing was “theoretical” … i dunno.. steve poland used to whip out ideas 10 times better than any of this on a daily basis.. multiple times a day… hehehe. So i dunno. Just as far from interesting as it can get, I think. (Had y’all been think-tanking for an actual startup then that might be interesting… hehehe)
the excitement should be in the process of how a panel of independently innovative super-personalities co-communicate and achieve off one another’s input… but again, this would come out in video but not so much in a post focused on whatever “app” was evenutally “chosen” to be the “fake app” that everyone blogs about…. bollocks. I want the real story Erick…
p.s. I think some of the “real story” is coming to life in the comments… was Blake honestly more ignored than Kevin because of social status? Does this affect real startups who might have very intelligent team members who are overshadowed by a more “celebrated” figure?
Does anyone else find this somewhat telling of how many big companies miss the mark on things sometimes… (look at the original google docs vs. writely for example… stomped, so they gave up and bought the smaller, better.) You have an “uber” panel and the best they come up with is, at best, a Xonbi plugin.
yes, yes, yes.. i use a mac too… i know… no xonbi. still, we are few.
sor for the triple play…
good point erick, 40 minutes… very true.
All the more reason to write up about the dynamics of the conversatios, how ego’s played… etc. For some reason I see a human story wanting to be told here as opposed to focusing on this application that really was never intended to be built (was it?) … the whole thing was about the people, not the app… i dunno… im jsut baffled… im begging erick for more on this one.
Is it a no-no to write more than one story about an event?
agree that email thing is a load of crap, no real person would be using it. My mom gets like 2 emails in her inbox per day. The rest is spam that gets filtered out.
Sure if you are a business owner, you’ll have a big message box, and this might be a good idea for a business. By then again, I don’t think a business wants to let its customers know that they have 300 messages unanswered.
And the whole digg vs twitter thing I agree completely, the amount of sackriding in this industry is appalling. Oh look Kevin freaking Rose came up with an idea, it must be GENIUS!
I’m confused, why is everyone wearing hats?
Why does the picture look like a college stage production of twelve angy men?
the 1950s called and they want their web apps back?
lmfao @ #22 & 12 angry men…. hahaha. that was funny. (though the hats are explained in comments above)
Here’s a simple and efficient way to prioritize your E-mail, SMS, Phone etc.: make people sending messages or calling you PAY you, i.e. re-introduce stamps — even for intra-office communication. If the cost is in the order of a postal stamp, people will eventually give up sending these useless 1 or 2 liner messages that interrupt your workflow all the time.
Maybe we could go one step further and make senders pay for prioritization in your inbox.
Make senders pay for your attention. We need a market economy for it.
Does anyone know if this FOWA panel was recorded / will be available to watch?
Cheers!
Funny, I was *just* talking about such a service about 4 months ago in the office, complete with the queue stats, reminders and everything. I came to the conclusion that the least offensive way to pull it off would be if the sender could get all of that information upon hovering over the recipient’s name in their email program… thus before they actually sent the email. That way, it wouldn’t really be an autoresponder that was giving you the info. It would be more of a pre-warning. The problem is, this implementation would be pretty tough to pull off, as it would require hooks into the e-mail client. Very tough to imagine being able to do that with Outlook, Apple Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, etc simultaneously.
Will there be any videos online?
I would pay to watch or just listen to it since I didn’t go.
I’m all in favour of applications that can help me keep my inbox organized. I’m also highly in favour of any conference where people dress up like Matt Drudge.
As Rob Poitras: there is any videos?
The photo is very pretty!
Re: “call-back service that would, in effect, allow you call companies” that already exists. I called yesterday the power company to get change my service. You first answer some questions, give your name and number and someone calls you back. They even give you an estimated callback time.
man this must of been a boring conference. Heres what i feel, not everybody is as popular as Kevin Rose. I get well over 1000 emails a week just with my real updates to everything i subscribe to and another 10000 in spam but thats all filtered out. How lazy do you have to be to feel that email and your phone is too much work now. what ever happen to getting a assistant, oh let me think Thats putting too much work on somebody else? Create Jobs and Pay well and all your email problems is over. Convert those friend blaster programs into a real organizing email software to be able to send messages back to a group of fans or friends at one time.
#5 - autoresponders? solving the problem of email overload by sending even more email?
cool hats
It’s good validation for Xobni that a group of smart entrepreneurs came up with basically the same idea. I’ve been VP Marketing at Xobni for just a couple months and I can definitely say there is a massive problem out there among mainstream email users. I was attracted to Xobni because it solves a real problem in a massive addressable market. Matt and Adam are visionaries for spotting it before all the big guys got in. We have an opportunity to engage users and really hone our solution based on their needs and feedback. But the big guys will definitely be jumping on this one too (see this Newsweek article http://www.newsweek.com/id/117050).
Was this recorded in video? I want to see this live..
I wrote about this problem recently. Email volumes are just too high for people to process them one by one the way email clients are currently designed. At ClearContext we’ve been working on ways to add structure around the email, contacts, documents, and other information that flows through the system so people can work at a higher level than the individual email message, which simply doesn’t work anymore. More detail on my “inbox and email thesis” at my blog: http://www.emaildashboard.com/.....nd-in.html
I got rid of my mobile phone, and only use Skype. So I am only available via Voice when I want to be “on”, or pre-agreed appointment. I have doing that since 2 years, and it has greatly reduced my stress levels.
I am quite happy with the email load, as I only get 60 a day. Most internal coporate communication happens via instant messaging. So again one can control when one is available or not. It is surprising how quickly people will adapt if not given a choice. The trade-off is that I loose out on people who communicate via impulse. How ever my productivity has increased, and overall more satisfied with not constantly being “available” to every Tom, Dick and Harry.
Cyber celebrities operate on a different plane wrt email, so I don’t know what would be best for them. But the principals of Getting Things Done have helped me keep my inbox consistently below 10 and often 0. The #1 rule being that your email inbox is just an inbox, not a to-do list. The delete key is your friend.
Erick,
(Disclaimer: maybe I’m being too careful, but I’d like to state upfront that the following covers my company and its approach.)
FWIW, we’ve been working on and around this problem for some time and what we’ve discovered is that there are quite a few layers to this. The feedback we’re getting from our customers is that email remains the center of their users’ daily lives but that there needs to be a way to do more with and through email while still keeping it all manageable. So basically what we’ve developed is a way for tying applications which are typically pitched as “email killers” (i.e. collaboration tools) into email. Here’s a video of the pilot we launched last December:
http://kryptiva.com/kcollab1.html
It’s a pilot, so it’s got lots of rough edges and it doesn’t even closely resemble the final product to be released, but it does give a good idea of the intent: add value to the user’s existing email experience by making modern-day collaboration an integral part of email exchanges. As to “how does this alleviate the email pain?” typically, among other things, this approach allows things such as file-sharing therefore avoiding the back-and-forth file change exchanges — that, in fact, is one of the reasons some of these collaboration tools are put forth in the first place. And because of the technical underpinnings, it works the same for users inside and outside your organization (this is the non-trivial technical achievement — ask anyone deploying modern-day collaboration and they’ll tell you the tools’ main problem is just that: federation.)
Here’s some coverage we got for the pilot:
http://www.enterprise2blog.com/?p=479
http://www.networkworld.com/ne.....tlook.html
If Techcrunch is interested, I could arrange for providing a certain number of invites for the product launch. Drop me an email (I’m assuming you can retrieve the “Mail” field from this post which is marked as “will not be published”.)
Best,
Karim Yaghmour
Founder and CEO
Kryptiva inc.
well I took the idea and had a tech demo up and running in about an hour using an adobe Air App and webbased .net app not sure if I can be arsed to do anything with it because It’s kinda useless :p
There are services that cut significantly on your email inspecific cases. For example http://www.TimeBridge.com helps you schedule meetings with very little emails, even with a large group of people. Or some of the 37signals stuff. The weird named IWantSandyends up doing the opposite - more emails!
Wow those hats are stupid looking.
that pic kind of looks like the last supper of web 2.0
Mike wrote about a phone tree killing service a while back. Although I assume it doesn’t keep you from having to wait on hold once you get through the tree.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....l-service/
I think the real question - is what’s up with all those 1950’s hats.
I have to agree with commenter 31.) Uway. The Virtual Assistant industry is booming. There are plenty of qualified, reliable and hard working VAs who can assist you with your information overload. No need for hiring an administrative assistant on staff. VAs are independent contractors. No need for additional office space. VAs work from their site. Come on give us little folks an opportunity. http://www.ivaa.org
Oh wait. This was the Future of Web Apps conference. Virtual Assistants need a web application that puts their email at the top of their client’s email inbox. The subject line must be bold. The client must not be able to open any other email until the Virtual Assistant’s email has been responded to.
Those are Ryan’s signature style hats so we made a few for him and his Carsonified team as a gift. Here is the story about the hats:
http://blog.youdesignit.com/20.....-the-hats/
“The stats would show your friends things like how many e-mails you got today, how many you’ve responded to, average response times, etc.”
This is exactly what Xobni does, if you check out the analytics. What you’re describing sounds like Xobni, Online Edition.
… my previous post seems to be stuck in the “Your comment is awaiting moderation” queue for some time, so here’s a shorter version in case length was an issue:
We’ve taken a stab at taking email to a whole new level by using it (as in namespace, transport and platform) as a launchpad for some modern-day collaboration tools such as file-sharing, application sharing and IM. Here’s s a short video demo of a very rough pilot we released last December:
http://www.kryptiva.com/kcollab1.html
If techcrunch is interested we could arrange for providing limited invites to TC readers on final release.
Keep an eye out for http://visualdial.com, a new startup focused on a few things, among them, solving the problem of navigating through phone trees and, better yet, navigating them before the call is even made! They want to shift the balance of IVR power to the end-user. Exciting stuff!
Glad the only time I wasted was reading this article and not actually attending.
First you call an app that has been around for years “brilliant”, then focus on one that is completely ludicrous and a concept born in the mind of the only person who may possibly need this, someone who is such a celebrity in their own mind they believe that somehow people who email him would be “honored” to know how popular he is.
I don’t know whats up with those hats but one thing i do know is that Matt Mullenweg was always wearing a hat and always a old school one at that. I think he started something with the hats.
Uway and ‘The Data Digger’ have it right. How ’bout something that’s been around since the 1800’s… it’s called a secretary - one who knows you, your needs, your moods and your contacts….. If you want to be all current about it, hire one in bangalore for $4/hour. http://fourhourworkweek.com/fe.....urcing.htm
Having an piece of software who knows who, what and when to prioritize in your daily communication might be a few years down the road. And will perhaps come to Japan first…? http://www.usatoday.com/tech/n.....bots_N.htm
Oh and PS. The day a startup guy can reintroduce a fashion trend, especially one based on hats that were never actually attractive on men, is the day the earth stands still. Yes, even if the next TC party is full of POPsugar fashionistas…. it ain’t gon’ happen folks.
Cheers!
This reminds me of back when there were no cellphones and it was pretty much impossible to call someone and change your mind after you (or they) had left home to meet up somewhere you had agreed.
That didn’t mean people had trouble meeting or being effective.
I believe the bigger problem is just the amount of email/information/etc that we now have all these easy to use channels for. It’s like we’re in a big room all shouting to each other. No wonder we are struggling to keep up.
I think the solution, probably in addition to making smarter apps as many have suggested here, would be to talk less and weird concepts like thinking before you talk. Stuff like that.
Know it sounds a little boring, but at least for (us) introverts, silence and a peaceful environment can be very productive factors.
Yahoo talked about email prioritization at the past CES: http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/.....ames-yang/
Your email would auto filter people who you interact with often via email, IM, and more.
Hahahah … the sole reason I clicked thru on my reader was to comment on the hat situation. I’m glad it wasn’t everyone trying to pose as visionaries and was merely a conference gimmick ….
Hahah … as I sit here in a coffee shop wearing my fedora.
-dm
Create an application that increases the number of emails, alerts, notifications that you need to go through, in order to help you get through the mountain of email you have already !?!
And again some of those people on the panel couldn’t code a compiling line of code if their life depended on it.
Leah Culver of Pownce came up with a white pages service that uses SMS text messages to look up phone numbers.
Google already does that. I am sorry but where have you guys been? text to 46645 with the business name and zip code or city name. You get the address and phone number back in SMS. With the google search feature, I didn’t even have to actually know the full name of the business. This little service from Google has saved me time so many times.
When we were in SF bay area for a business trip, one guy decided that we must have in-n-out burger for lunch. Being not from around the area, nobody knew where to go from some random parking lot we were in. I got the address of the newest in-n-out with my 3 yr old verizon phone without GPS or any fancy browser just by sending a text msg. This was after the guy with the hand held GPS and 2 guys with iPhones finished typing in and fumbling with slow data load and mistyping and decided that they couldn’t get it.
“Blaine Cook of Twitter suggested creating a call-back service that would, in effect, allow you call companies and put them on hold until a human answered. In other words, you would specify what department you want to speak with at a company, and the software would call and go through the phone tree, and digitally push all the right buttons until it got to a human operator, at which point it would ring your phone. I thought this was brilliant.”
The Lypp API already does most of this, and there is a Ruby on Rails plugin for it.
the answer to clutter is not more clutter (even if it’s wrapped in a shiny web 2.0 website).
besides, you shouldn’t need a web app to tell you you’re being a d*ck to your mom
“Leah Culver of Pownce came up with a white pages service that uses SMS text messages to look up phone numbers.”
Whrrl already does this, too. Text to 94775 with anything from “s in ” to “s near ” and get search results and with detailed information on places throughout the US. I was just in San Francisco and found a place to work from by searching “s free wifi near bush st, sf”, and I only had to walk 2 blocks to get there!
ack, I wrote stuff in brackets that looked too much like html.
You can send anything from “s business name in city” to “s cuisine type near street” to Whrrl at 94775 and get detailed information on places nearby (address, phone, street corner, ratings, and more cool stuff)
We’re about to launch a public beta of an email product that allows teams to collaborate on email in shared inboxes such as sales@, marketing@ or customerservice@. You can learn more about it and sign up for a beta invitation here:
http://www.emailcenterpro.com/
Email Center Pro allows multiple people to simultaneously work on mail in inboxes that have a high volume of email. It protects you from stepping on a co-worker’s toes and answering the same email twice. You can assign email to people, easily move email from one inbox to another, and respond using templates. The system tracks all user actions so you can see exactly who did what at any time.
If you’re interested, sign up for the beta at the URL above.
How about an automated way to delegate problems that are initiated through email? Something like a social network where your inbox becomes a blog or bug tracker for your underlings. You review their work by looking at the management report rather than manually handing off and tracking every minor issue. Obviously you’d need separate email addresses for personal business and for dealing with higher-ups at work.
Popular people attract hangers-on who hope the popular person can solve all their problems. The key is to have something to offer them (in return for money or some other favor) that in most cases doesn’t involve spending your own time. If you are too overwhelmed with requests to even delegate tasks in a timely manner, then you need to create a “department” to handle the problem and hand off entire classes of issues to it.
It’s not about managing your email, it’s about managing the people you deal with. Software cannot give you better social skills.
Quit giving your main address to everyone you meet a a party. If you get too much email, you are too desperate to make “friends”. Figure out what people want from you and delegate most of them to someone else before they start emailing and calling you.
What we need is a gmail api. Once we have that (or if we already do, I think) then we create a frontend to it, that is written in Lisp, and would use simple AI to automate certain things and be very friendly to plugin developers to handle specific tasks.
For example, I use eBay’s Saved Searches feature to get the latest items that match a certain search for new items in my inbox. For example, one such saved search is
(ultra160, “ultra 160″) -”Drive Tray” -”host adapter” -”SCSI PCI Card” -”scsi card” -MOTHERBOARD -”SCA Adapter” -”Converter Adapter” -18gb -18.4gb -18.2gb -18.4 -serveraid -”DRIVE ENCLOSURE” -18.2 -cables -cable -9.19gb -9.1gb to 25$.
Another search is the one above without the limitation of 25$.
Another search is scsi (all categories) (items listed as lots)
Yet another one is adaptec raid to 40$
Also I have other saved searches for logitech wireless mice, yankee screwdrives, n64 games to 9$, essential oils, various books, taiyo yuden dvdr, various bulk herbs, rare music cds etc…. But what if I want a custom sort when and only when I am viewing the ebay searches label in gmail? For example, always put the music cd searches first, then the wireless mice, then the
Of course, you could make filters and labels for those specific searches, but I’m always adding new searches and unsubscribing/deleting old ones, which makes it a chore. What showing that days email in a custom sort?
Perhaps email needs a customized latent semantic analysis application, that can figure out what an email means before we ever read it.
I believe the Mahogany Imap email program is written in Python and could be extended and programmed in this way.
Also, I think the idea of getting things done is great. Do the things that take under a minute or so right now, that way the longer tasks aren’t mentally crowded out by the shorter ones.
Ohhhhh, here’s an easy one, an rss feed for your email. Gmail has this already, but only through a logged in browser.
At least the “who do I still need to reply to” and “who sends a lot more email than he gets from me” (or the other way round) type of questions are easy to answer with Firefox with this extension called “EagleEye”.
http://eagleeye.sourceforge.net/
It also finds “lost friends” which you haven’t contacted for quite some time or allows you to restrict your search to male/female senders/recipients etc.
Those hats make the panelists look like complete douchebags.
Hi.
You can hear the audio from each of the presentations (apart from Kathy Sierra’s which will be coming soon) at http://futureofwebapps.com/200.....events.php
Click on the MP3 link under Erick’s name for the panel session audio.
Cheers
Because of the emails being forgotten past 50, I now Show 100 conversations per page in gmail. If you’ve got speed, why not?
FastCall411 offers 2 new voice applications (in limited beta) FastCall is a parallel dialing application. Need a dentist with an appointment open today? We dial as many as required to find the local dentist with availability. Want more than one quote. Stay on the line and TryAnother continues making connections with available local merchants. TryAnother is also great when the first merchant you’ve called doesn’t answer the phone to begin with. The bottle neck in local search is finding a merchant that is not only recommended, but available. http://www.fastcall411.com
There needs to be an email bugging app that works with everything, and doesn’t violate your privacy, unlike readnotify.com, which hp used. You want to know if they read the email, and for how long.