Vasant Kumar

exploring new things..

How Apple or Google could improve mobile e-mail..

We have all seen an e-mail with that ends with “Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry” or “Sent from my iPhone”. These signatures are there to let you know the e-mail was sent from a mobile device (with some not-so-subtle advertising courtesy of the network and/or manufacturer).

But isn’t it time we come up with something better?

What if the e-mail clients themselves just put a small phone icon by each message that came from a mobile device?

It is actually really easy.

In an e-mail, all of the relevant information about the message is stored in something called a header:

From: Vasant Kumar <vasantk@gmail.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0 (1.0)
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:39:43 -0500
Delivered-To: vasantk@gmail.com
Message-ID: <-1564228226113230569@unknownmsgid>
Subject: Test
To: Vasant Kumar <vasantk@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

This header contains what is needed to properly display the e-mail.

Web browsers use headers too and include a user-agent in it to tell a website whether you are using a PC or an iPhone so it can adjust the layout accordingly. E-mail clients support the same thing — it is just never used.

What if mobile e-mail clients used their user-agent to identify themselves as phones?

Then we can get rid of things like “Sent from my iPhone” and replace it with my proposal above.

Will it ever happen? Probably not. It would need to be supported by numerous e-mail clients to work properly and, more importantly, manufacturers aren’t going to want to lose their free marketing.

Still, it’s food for thought.

2 Comments by  /  January 16, 2012  /  Posted in: Uncategorized
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  1. Neil

     /  January 18, 2012

    I think some people like it right in the body of the email because there it can be seen as easily as the typos. Your way could still excuse typos, but people like that to be front and center so there’s no confusion.

    Reply

  2. Vasant

     /  January 18, 2012

    Hey Neil,

    Thanks for checking out my blog.

    I think that’s a fair point. You are right, to a degree, but I still think it should exist as part of the metadata (and not the message) at which point the e-mail client itself can choose how to display it.

    Also, I don’t think that users really care to let people know what brand of phone they are using or what carrier they are on.

    Reply

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