Emails are broken.

Emails make me waste my time. But I need them. Given the importance that emails have in our lives, it's incredible it's still one of the only software areas that did not evolve in the past 20 years!

Reading my inbox is the most unproductive task I do on a daily basis. I have to spend one full hour a day to process my emails. All the junk flows in the same inbox; spams, information that doesn't matter, quoted answers of quoted answers, etc. At the end of the hour, only 10 emails actually requested an answer from me. With a good tool, I could have done my job in 10 minutes!

At Odoo, we build tools to bring productivity to enterprises. As emails and information flows are one of the biggest wastes of time in companies, we have to fix this.

To disrupt emails, you need more than just another user interface. We need to rethink the whole communication flow.

The Communication Mechanism of Odoo

Here are the ideas behind the Odoo communication tools:

• Get Things Done: your inbox is a todo list. You should be able to process (not only read) the inbox and easily mark messages for future actions. Every inbox should be empty after having been processed; no more overload of information.
• Keep control of what you want to receive or don't want to receive. People should never receive spam. You should follow/unfollow any kind of information in one click.
• Productivity is key: our smart user interface does not require you to click on every mail to read a thread. Reading a full thread, replying, attaching documents is super fast.
• A mix of push & pull: Today, people are victims of what others decide to push to them. Odoo differentiates:
  • Messages "for information": you can pull them when you need some specific information; they are not required to be read every day.You receive only what you decided to follow.This accounts for 90% of your daily emails.Use the "Inbox" menu for these.
  • Messages "for action": they require your immediate attention and you need to process them all. This accounts for 10% of your daily emails. Use the "To: me" menu for these.
• Focus on the Content: Everything is stripped to emphasize on the real message. No more welcome introductions, greetings, signatures and legal notes.We standardize the layout of each message. (signatures are on the profile of a contact, not in every message)
• Folders and mailing lists are great tools but too complex in traditional email clients. In Odoo, a group of contacts that share a discussion can be created with one click. Every group should have it's own email address.