You are right. My Lotus Notes email is a huge information store of people I work with. My own Sent Mail folder has 6,000 entries and 1,000 unique names.

Facebook categorizes mail by Friends and Others

Does Lotus Notes offer this feature

Not until now. Frank Paolino, a Lotus Notes business partner, has a development project that makes Lotus Notes email Social.

He calls it Preferred email.

How does it work? It sounds complicated.

Actually, it is simple.

All inbound mail is checked against the list of people in the sent mail folder. If there is a match, it shows up in your Inbox.

And the messages that do not match?

They show up in a folder called Other

I would like to see this new idea working in a Lotus Notes mailbox.

Here is my demonstration project to attempt to build a "Facebook style" social inbox for Lotus Notes.

This is what I have built so far to see if this idea is feasible:

First, my Lotus Notes email (and yours) is a great big information store. It reflects all of my social circle, people that I regularly correspond with. My own "Sent" folder has 6,000 entries and 1,000 unique names that I have sent mail to.

From my SENT FOLDER I can then determine my "important contacts"

These people, these “important contacts”, when they mail me, will show up in my Inbox.

In addition, all Lotus Notes users in my organization also show up in my Inbox, as they are already in my social and business circle.

The “OTHER” folder is new. If I have never emailed a sender, then they automatically show up in the "OTHER" folder, which, in my test, I found myself checking 2-3 times a day.

As you can see, there is a variety of communications that go on here with people I have never sent an outbound mail to.

What if I find an email that I want to always appear in the Inbox? I just drag it into the “Preferred list”, and this is now my new preference.

Take for example this LinkedIn notification. I just drag it to my “Preferred Senders” list, and from now on that will show up in my “Inbox” (and not on my “OTHER” list).

On the other hand, if I want someone to appear in the "Other" or "Junk" folder, I can do that, too, by grabbing their email and dragging and dropping to the Junk list.

And I can always change my mind later, again just by dragging and dropping to the new folder.

When I want to view the lists that I have made, I can review the choices by clicking on the "Lists".

So In my tests so far I have found this to be a great way to segregate my mail between the people I know and my important contacts from the people that I have very little contact with.