Awayfind tries to solve the ’email sucks’ problem with relevant alerts

I call it ‘ inbox fear.’ It’s the feeling I have every morning right before I open my email inbox, the dread of how many hundreds of new, irrelevant emails will be awaiting for my undivided attention.

Lets face it: email sucks, it’s an ancient part of Internet communication that desperately needs innovation. It’s not just startups who are trying to solve the inbox problem, Google tried and failed with Wave. No one has quite managed to succeed yet, but that hasn’t stopped entrepreneurs from trying. Que San Francisco based Jared Goralnick, founder of Awayfind.com, the browser plugin allows you set up alerts based on email importance.

If you were waiting on some very important news but you were in a meeting and didn’t want to keep checking your email again and again to see if the mail had arrived, Awayfind lets you set up alerts for a specific email so you can get notifications as soon as it arrives. I talk to Jared about how the app works and my main concern: the time it takes to set up versus the overall time it can save you.