Gmail saw that there was an address in the email that I received and, unobtrusively, gave me an option in the top right column to map that address. In a way, the feature was almost "too" unobtrusive as I have no idea how long this feature has been living in Gmail interface!

Maybe it's something more like this that Outlook enables – or something similar to how Blackberry handles phone number, highlighting them and enabling an appointment to be automatically set based on some predefined search parameters focused on the content of the email.

r.

One way that I could see this being useful is if every time I dragged an email (or task or anything else) onto the Calendar folder in Outlook that it automagically grabbed the date info and pre-populate that for me.

The debate, in my mind at least, is quite similar to opt in vs. opt out. Do you want ALL date info embedded in email associated to your calendar or just the date info you are interested in?

r.

Gmail saw that there was an address in the email that I received and, unobtrusively, gave me an option in the top right column to map that address. In a way, the feature was almost “too” unobtrusive as I have no idea how long this feature has been living in Gmail interface!

Maybe it's something more like this that Outlook enables – or something similar to how Blackberry handles phone number, highlighting them and enabling an appointment to be automatically set based on some predefined search parameters focused on the content of the email.

r.

One way that I could see this being useful is if every time I dragged an email (or task or anything else) onto the Calendar folder in Outlook that it automagically grabbed the date info and pre-populate that for me.

The debate, in my mind at least, is quite similar to opt in vs. opt out. Do you want ALL date info embedded in email associated to your calendar or just the date info you are interested in?

r.