Ideally, Nimble would allow users to make a bullet-proof system for prioritizing and responding to emails from different contact groups. Basically, a personal or team set of Service Level Agreements. For example, a saved search would show all contacts tagged "Investor" that had not had a response within 1 day.

To do this cleanly, there needs to be a way to distinguish between inbound and outbound "Last Contacted" dates.

Note that such a system would also allow users an improved overview of loops that are open from the other side. That is, a user might want to give contacts tagged "Investor" a week to reply to messages before following up, but contacts tagged "Supplier" only 72 hours.

Nimble appears to already log this information: in the "Pending and History" tab under a contact, email messages in e.g. John Doe's account are annotated "John Doe to Jane Doe" or "Jane Doe to John Doe." Whether or not this information is truly part of Nimble's database, or just exposing attributes from Gmail and perhaps other services, it seems to be there somehow.

Nimble could implement this feature via:
1) A "Last Message From" field in Advanced Search with the following choices:
* Your Team
* Contact

and/or

2) An update to the basic search box that allows it to accept advanced requests over a fuller range of fields in the database and with full boolean logic, similar to Google Advanced Search. The fields and syntax are in a separate help file. So in the case of wanting to make sure no Investor's message goes more than 24 hours unanswered, one would type "tag:investor lastcontact:>1d lastmessage_from:contact"

Relatedly, it would be a help if the number of messages found by a saved search would display in the main contact page next to the saved search name/link. (Nimble already knows how to display this number, because it puts it in the heading of a saved search's page when you click on its link in the main contact page.) Otherwise, one would have to keep tabs open, auto-refreshed, and visible for each saved search to be up-to-the-minute on SLAs.