⌥ Tabs

Yahoo India wanted a concept on a web2.0 mailbox for hiring new UX designers. They came up with a fancy name for it too (forgot what it was..) This is what I came up with-

A web2.0 mailbox

Web2.0 is fresh market opportunities, mashups, virtual communities with intense self-expression, old /new technology with a desktop feel.
E-mail is the most popular activity on the internet. Then search and messaging follow. Both of these are gathering information for storing or sharing. Inbox is mostly used as newsgatherer, notifier..

Personal Features

1 Mail Yourself (kinda like a cardboard box for yourself to store files)- if you want people to actually use 2 GB
2 Favorite links, videos and other media should also be kept in one’s mailbox – most of the fwds are forgotten and lost in the unbrowsable column of cryptic subject lines (“you gotta see this !!!!!!”) attachment should have a preview
> embedded media viewer
> tagging and storage of other content in your mailbox
> sending audio messages – not as attachments but with like podcast conversations – there are somethings that cannot be written, only said – if everyone can voicechat, asynchronous voice-chat will also be fun. offline messaging

Social Features

1 Improve your personal and oldest social network – your address book :: your contacts are vital to you. there is a display of your “most frequently mailed” people, “less frequently mailed” people and “rarely mailed” people. you can be prompted to mail the less frequent ones. tag view for friends – all for encouragement to increase mail frequency. the idea is seeing someone whom you havent mailed in years – ok months.

2 Tag your contacts too – no more selecting which mail to fwd to which of your friends. tag friends according to their interests (techies, musicians). People with more than two tags will be sent mail once
> if there are lots of addresses in cc, that means the sender has no objection if others see to whom all he is sending the mail
> the mailing lists that you are part of

Gmail is my benchmark. Of course the ideas are at a nascent stage

=======