Ok, it's not a problem that doesn't exist. It exists, but it's insignificant.
I think that working on the "email noise problem" when you could be building a profitable business helping people prevent or cure life-threatening conditions is a terrible use of brainpower.
If you help doctors, researchers, and others working on life-threatening problems get relevant information they need faster, then you are indirectly helping with these efforts. Not everyone can be the person on the frontline of these critical efforts, but if you can improve their working conditions then surely you've helped out a bit?
These are precisely the people that should not be having emails deleted automatically. "Wait which kidney was I supposed to remove" let me check that email... oops
This idea would only be good for spam "buy now before its too late" type emails (ie non-important information) which is not a problem that really needs solving.
Yeah, you're right. I was responding to the general problem of finding stuff in your inbox as restated by others - not the suggestion of self-destructing email. Sorry I was unclear.
Insignificant to you, maybe. But this is a big problem to me. Preventing life-threatening diseases is insanely important and I don't want to discourage anyone from working on it, but it doesn't mean other problems shouldn't be solved or worked on.
But a meeting invite from the past may contain other information I want in the future. Deciding what is useful to keep and what can be safely trashed is a very tricky (if not impossible) problem.
As for generic expiry of individual emails, Lotus Notes has been doing that for years and years. It doesn't provide expiry of emails that go outside of Notes, but that is not what it's trying to solve. Internal data retention policies become much easier to handle if it's enforced by every user's mail client.
