A new email startup aims to minimize email fatigue with management features driven by context.
Timyo, an abbreviation for “Time is my own,” is a new email solution that allows email senders to indicate when they expect a message response. For example, an urgent email may include the headline “To-Do by Today” while a less critical missive may say “Read by Tomorrow.” The tasks are displayed in email previews, and users can choose to color-coordinate their assignments as well.
Timyo was originally founded in 2013, and the company focused on product research and development for the next two years. The email platform first went live at the beginning of 2016, and Timyo has since expanded to be available on Gmail, iOS, Outlook, and via a Chrome extension.
The solution is compatible with any email client, and works best when both sender and receiver have the Timyo email platform -- in which case the time display is illustrated alongside the subject line. When the email recipient does not use Timyo, the management feature is displayed at the top of the email message.
Fabrice Dumans, co-founder of Timyo, acknowledges the problem with email volume. “At the end of the day, when you look at your email inbox and you see 50 emails arrayed -- which one do you read before leaving the office? You don’t want to miss anything that should have been read, but you also don’t want to waste your time by reading 50 emails that could have waited."
Dumans says email senders have a responsibility to let the recipient know “what matters today and what matters now” -- adding that the company aims to “restore the balance between recipients and senders.”
With about 70,000 subscriptions and 10,000 active users, Dumans says, Timyo has not yet seen any examples from an email marketing perspective, but he is curious to see how marketers might leverage the feature.
Many companies are currently trying to solve email fatigue with artificial intelligence (AI), says Dumans, adding that he has two main concerns with that approach: time and privacy.
“AI will help at some point, but we don’t know when that will be because the machines need time to learn,” says Dumans. “If you want to introduce AI, you need to allow the machines to read your email. Privacy is very important to us.”
Timyo simply enters a time dimension module into an email messages, but otherwise does not access any other aspect of the copy.