Ever longed for a tool that could give you feedback on the health of your email inbox? Listen in as I take on the challenge of creating one from scratch. Here in the third and final episode in this series, I continue working with Dr. Michael Einstein to create an email health calculator.
We take the lessons learned from the prior discussion and start by listing a hierarchy of concerns. They are listed here from 1-5 in rank order.



1. How many days of stored email are accumulated?  (read vs unread, subscribed vs non-subscribeds)


2. How old are these message? (read vs. unread)


3. How unique are these messages? (subscribed vs non-subscribeds)


4. How fast are they entering? (incoming email)


5. How complicated are they by being threaded?



During the hiatus since the last episode, I drafted a weight for each measure and after playing with the tool we would be using, producing the following formula which we discussed in this episode.



0.25 x Left Behind Index (i.e. (Total messages in your inbox - unread messages-tagged, read messages)/incoming email each day)


0.20 x Number of Days Surprise Index (i.e. unread messages – unread subscriptions email)/incoming email each day)


0.20 x Total messages older than a day)/incoming mail each day


0.20 x (Average age of non-Subscription messages/days)


0.20 x ( .50 x Average age of Subscription messages/days)


0.10 x Incoming Email each day / messages removed per day


0.20 x Threaded messages



The final input into the calculoid app used the following weights which were simply scaled so that they would sum to 1.0:



Field 1  - 18%   Left Behind Index [i.e. (Total messages in your inbox - unread messages-tagged, read messages)/incoming email each day)]


Field 2 - 14%   Number of Days Surprise Index [i.e. unread messages – unread subscriptions email)/incoming email each day]


Field 3 - 14%   Total messages older than a day)/incoming mail each day


Field 4 - 14%   Average age of non-Subscription messages/days


Field 5 - 7%    Average age of Subscription messages/days


Field 6 - 11%   Max(1, incoming email/150)


Field 7 - 7%    Incoming Email each day / messages removed per day


Field 8 - 14%   Threaded messages x #average active participants in each thread
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