I need a website widget that tells people how likely I am to respond to email

I get a decent amount of email through my website (many for Posterous customizations), and I feel bad when I find a cluster of emails sent a while back that I never replied to. I hate it when this happens because many people take personal offense when they don't get a response, when in reality, I just ran out of time - it wasn't anything personal.

What I think I need is a Gmail plugin that would perform a calculation and display the result on my website to people who email me. (If something like this exists, PLEASE let me know.) Here's what it needs to do:
  • How many emails does Cory have starred? (I use Gmail's starring feature to remind me what emails I need to reply to.)
  • How many of starred emails have been replied to within the past week/month?
  • Based upon how many starred emails exist, for what amount of money am I most likely to respond to an email?
But the problem that I see with this would be, if less people emailed me and I started responding to a higher percentage of messages that I receive, will the plugin start telling people that I'm more likely to start responding to messages? That's why I think it would be important for the system to know how much money I am likely to make from the messages I choose to respond to. If the plugin knew that I regularly respond to emails that solicit jobs banking me $10k+, then it could display a message indicating that trend and weed out cheapskates.

Like I said, if something like this exists, please let me know. I really think it would be useful. Just leave it as a comment - don't email me. =]

Comments

Hey Cory- I was looking around for some info on gmail/stars and found a post about this lab product. Would this help you on your way to doing what you need to do? http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/3-gmail-labs-features-that-will-spice.html

Not sure what you could use to keep track of how many of those you sent out/replied to within the last time frame, but this could get you started. If this helps get you thinking great...I need some help with your Tabby theme. I'm looking to get rid of the All Topics tab and have the ability to create an ABOUT tab that is static and won't change when I add posts, etc.

Thanks Cory. ryan@tracemedia.com

Maybe instead of your emailers thinking that you are thinking about money (which is still very important!), maybe some sort of lab feature that reports the amount of "new" emails in your box to the emailers so that they have an expectation.

Another thing you may think about is hiring a personal virtual assistant (asksunday.com) that is given a criteria to evaluate emails and respond to emails that meet a certain criteria. Then the more business value emails get "labelled." So you wouldn't necessarily have to deal with every email, but you still could see what they say. And if you're comfortable giving access to a VA for your business email...could be interesting.

Lots more of cool ideas from Tim Ferriss at www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog....he is also a Posterous Investor.

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