As discussed in other posts, I spend a lot of time in email, and much of the email I get is related to MongoDB’s Jira. I’ve written before about my Jira summarizer, which maintains a single message in your inbox with a summary of recent activity in projects you watch. In my continuing quest to make Jira email easier to deal with, I wrote a tool to make it easier to quickly assess the email notifications about individual issues.

I’ve written a Python program to do something fancy with JIRA that I couldn’t get using built-in facilities. You already get notifications from Jira about the tickets you personally care about, based on your notification settings. My tool will give you, additionally, an hourly email in your inbox summarizing all the changes in projects you care about, skipping the the ones you already got direct notifications of. Not only that, but it will make sure that you only ever have one of these summaries in your inbox, by consolidating them when a new summary is generated. It’s only at version 0.2 at the moment, but I’m opening it up today and hopefully some of you will find it useful. Over time, I hope we can polish it some more.

Email is my prefered method of communication (besides in person). At the same time, I get a lot of it, so making it better via tooling is very important to me. A large proportion of the emails I (and many other people, I’m sure – especially those in the tech world) receive are generated automatically, from LinkedIn notifications to Jira updates to monitoring alerts.

Email is good at receiving information, but then acting on the information is encumbered by the need to link out to a browser. In fact, the whole process is ungainly: receive email -> link out to browser for a single action -> return to inbox to delete message and move on, often to the next message generated by the same web app. Fixing this is just a matter of allowing mail clients a means of handling actions without linking out. They already format HTML and CSS, it’s time to add javascript as well. Let me give you a couple of examples.

I get a lot of email. I used to think I got a lot of email, but that was before 10gen. Maybe one day I’ll remember writing this and laugh because comparatively today’s load is light. I hope not, because that thought is frankly scary.

There are a number of programs I’ve written to help me deal with email. One of them is less about helping me, and more about letting the people around me know that I don’t have a special desire to ignore them.