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Buried in email?
Jethro73 writes "There is an article on Yahoo! about how Workers are mired in e-mail wasteland. They say employees waste an hour a day managing e-mail. This page at Cisco claims employees spend two hours per day, but cite a 15% increase in worker's productivity despite that." A few weeks ago I blew up my laptop and lost all my mail filters. When I got everything back up, I discovered that over 70% of my email is junk (compared to 25% after all my filters were in place). Filtering my mail is the only thing that makes reading my email possible. Well, that and ignoring any message complaining about Karma :)
This really has nothing to do with anything. Since I am in involved in computers as a profession, commonly people will ask me for help, like my parents friends (when I'm home visiting).
One of these people is old. Like...I'd say...70-80's old. She insists that she must be getting porn spam because some young man ( maybe her nephew I think) sent her an email, and he looks at porn. I tried to explain to her that it wasnt the case. She didnt believe me.
Ohwell, I guess maybe I should stop putting her email into all the porn sites I vist.
I've caught at least two girls at work looking at naked musclemen on the web. Once one of the girls here was just about demo a website design to 5 of us. She clicked the wrong tab on the windows desktop, to reveal the porn site she was browsing. Embrassed she hit the close window button, big mistake, the evils of respawn porn ads quickly filled the screen.
- A.P.
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Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Until you sign up for a mailinglist that automatically adds a "how to unsubscribe" section on the bottom of each message. :)
Not that it helps, even with a little note on the bottom of every message people still manage to post "How do I unsubscribe?" messages about once a week or so on even moderatly crowded mailinglists.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
True, but at least with email it is easy to skip the long winded but useless parts.
"Hi hank, this is andrea at extention 123, thanks for getting back to me on the bacon problem, I have one more question: how many cysts are accaptable in a slice?" Said aloud I waste a couple borning minutes before getting to something useful. A reply by voice mail is just as bad because I have to give a summery of the question first. In email I just replay with an answer "5", while in voice mail my reply is "Hello andrea, about your questions about the acceptable limit of cysts in bacon, 5 reasonable limit."
Of course the above example is completely made up. (A engineer who knew a female to talk to should have been your first clue.) You get the idea, voicemail is nice, but it wastes a lot of time with redundancy and boiler plate. Email has the same thing, but you an quickly skip it.
People do this where I work, and I think it's bothersome and rude. The default strategy should be to communicate asynchronously, and only right my phone when an email will not suffice.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
>is really that harmful. After all, how long does it take to read one
>line and click delete.
Yeah, it's quality marketing, not spam . . .
hawk, now taking his tongue back out of his cheek
Their response was to send me a URL to a form I should print out, fill out, return, and wait for my "request" to be considered.
It was a lot easier to just install list managing software on my own machine . . .
hawk
While I didn't advertise that (and didn't expect it myself at first),
when I hired secretaries while practicing law, the *bulk* of my decision
was actually made during the initial phone call inquiring about the
job. For a small law practice, the secretary's phone presense
is a make or break issue . . .
hawk
hmm, maybe 4th class, too--I think that that's the classification for books . . .
hawk
Does not mean that you have anything of intrest to say! Actualy I don't get much junk at all, most of what I get are mailing lists that I want to get.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
If you're concluding that the spam is from accounts at hotmail, etc, because a free account address appears in the From: line, you're making an erroneous conclusion. From: lines on spam are almost always forged, and typically do not indicate the real originator or the spam. For the originator, you have to trace the Received: lines, and the best that can typically give you is an ip address. A better conclusion would be that it's popular among spammers to forge a free account in the From: field. I don't think this is something that you can hold hotmail et al responsible for.
Well, it's true that that bill passed Congress. That, however, is irrelevant because it didn't pass the Senate, and wasn't signed by the President. It isn't law in the U.S. or anywhere else.
It gets rather amusing to see this disclaimer appearing on spam that originates outside the U.S. or advertises products/services for non-U.S. businesses. Gee, the U.S. must have become really powerful if a bill that didn't actually make it into law affects the rest of the world.
All in all, it again reinforces the 3 laws of anti-spamming:
Exactly what were they using their products for, if not electronic mail?
Pegasus handles some of these things well. It supports multiple identities very well, has a good filter system w/ color highlighting and such... The current version works fairly well, and there's a major new version due out later this year...
Best of it, it's free (as in beer, not speech).
See http://www.pmail.com/
Someone beat you to it.
I have a filter that drops any mail I am copied on instead of my name in the TO field. I tell people this. If you only want to CYA don't bother me - I won't read it. I probably won't read it anyway unless you also call me and ask me to. For all short stuff we use an IM app - usually because we're all on the phone most of the time.
Who can possibly read all their email in an hour?
: )
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
My dirty joke email is the only decent email I get all day! And if your spending 49 minutes a day on junk mail, you need to learn how to use filters. Damn IT (aka desktop nazi's)!, they put up proxies so I cant surf pr0n or pop my email, they filter my exchange email for jokes/exe's, they run startup domain scripts to install bigbrother software, whats next keyloggers and ankle chains?! BTW, to fight IT, I ssh tunnel to my home linux box, and run a proxy, I disabled login scripts, and put jokes/exe's inside of word docs.
I quit when they get ankle chains!
root@
postmaster@
webmaster@
sales@
feedback@
nslookup, get domain owner
Email upstream provider
http://spamcop.net
http://mail-abuse.org
http://www.junkemail.org
Filter Filter Filter!
Who's the idiot who moderated this "redundant"?
It was the first legitimate response to the story, how the hell can it be redundant?
If you're moderating, set for "oldest first (ignore threads" and shit like this won't happen.
Whomever you are, I'm off to remove one of your karma points now...
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Personally I wouldn't complain about getting some Hot Slippery Teens in my mailbox.
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I check my email when I've been working on something for a while and need a break to think about something else. If I didn't check email, I'd have to read /. instead, and we all know what a productivity suck that is :) The average worker is going to waste a certain amount of time every day - email makes it possible to be somewhat productive during "mental task switching" time which would otherwise be involved in gossiping, smoke breaks, or pranks on coworkers. That's why, even with almost an hour "wasted" on email every day, people are more productive now.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
well, you could still write the code! It just wouldn't do much...
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
That's not coming until the NEXT version... :)
My journal has hot
Wow, I just spent an hour on the 'Death to Spam' it was v interesting, thier entire site seems so genuine it is scary.
:)
/., it is totaly unuseable, but I do like a cheerup every now and then so I read some of the messages, y'know, 'Mortgages' 'Low credit?' 'Ultra Teex XXX' etc.., I have made it my challenge, to get as much spam as possible into this account, then reply with all the messages attached every now and then, only problem is the account size limit!)
I advise anyone to visit the page for at least 5 mins, you might learn something usefull
(P.S. My first email account was a hotmail account, I viseted a site and put in my email address about 4 years ago, Now I get anywhere between 80-160 messages a day. I use this address to register at most websites now even
mountvol \\?\brain{dbe069b1-65ae-11d5-bab4-806d6172696f}\h
If it had passed, it would be referred to as Public Law XX-YYY, and as a US Code citation, i.e. XX USC YYY (differing values of X and Y for both cases cited above. . .)
Yes, it's FUD. Feel free to ignore it. Any remove that actually hits an address will likely add your address to 6.02x10^23 additional spam lists. . . .
They say employees waste an hour a day managing e-mail
/.
And seven hours a day posting on
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Those particular e-mails especialy piss me off Those assholes have the balls to tell me that their spam isn't spam? I emeidiatly proccess those through spamcop
http://Lenny.com
Email addresses were supposed to be the ultimate in portable commmunications - you could read your email everywhere, and you'd have it forever.
But the reality is, the longer you have an email address, the more lists it gets put on, and the more crap you get, until even the filters can't hold back the tide of crap, and you're forced to just give up and get a new address.
I've had this email address since 1995, and let me tell you, I get the craziest crap on a daily basis - probably 80% to 90% of the stuff I get is spam...
What I wanted to do was use the blocklists that my web proxy uses eg. junkbuster
I also wanted to tie it to my fetchmail. That way I could 'pre-delete' any e-mail i saw on my pop3 account(s) without ever downloading to my site/pc. eg. using subject headers
BTW, you did not say... is this GPL? ;)
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
I agree. Just think how much more bonding we would have among our employees as they have to wait for each other in meeting rooms to discuss a problem, instead of just sending a email to several recipients which they all can read at their own leisure. Of course, since the points are documented in a nice compact format, the engineers and all will get to meet a second time when one forgot.
/.s that don't understand sarcasm: People have a lot of email because it is often better than discussing stuff in the halls.
For the
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
There is a pretty useful way around this. Set up a bunch of email groups like mycompany-chilli, mycompany-garagesales and so on. Then simply don't subscribe anyone by default and let them figure out what the salient groups are by themselves. And, of course, go after everyone that posts to a work related group.
It not only keeps the load down for people who want to get their work done, but it also channels the distructive energies of the "But Merciful God..." group
A copy of S.1618 can be read at the following address:1 618es.htm
http://www.techlawjournal.com/congress/slamspam/s
As the notice at the top says, the bill never became law, but it probably doesn't surprise anyone that the morons who try to make money fast with unsolicited commercial mail don't know any better than to copy and paste the canned paragraph you quoted!
More about this bill and why the "This message cannot be considered spam" claim is nonsense can be read at:
http://www.profitjump.com/articles/0705-spam.html
In a slowing economy, where businesses are looking for ways to cut costs and increase productivity, simply cutting out unnecessary e-mail will have an immediate impact. What a load of crap. Looks like the "research firm" Gartner is suffering from a slowing economy itself and needs a quick shot in the arm. Oi! Doesn't the preview button work anymore?
Try this. I hardly get any junk mail or solicitations anymore. Now, if there were only a way to stop getting junk mail for the previous 10 years of tennants in my apartment...
+++ ATH0 +++
I avoid wasting time with lots of email by ignoring the email and wasting the time on /.
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Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Hahaha! Sorry, No. I'm 22. I'm a full time college student. I have two jobs. Most of my e-mail comes from eBay auctioning and from collecting old computers (which, by the way, is quite hard when you don't have a lot of money to spend). Boy, you had me figured wrong!
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SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
I get 100 to 200 messages a day, and usually no spam. Every one of these messages is relevant in some way to the things that I do or like. Many are the communications between myself and people I'm setting up business transactions with. I don't think that the time I spend reading and answering all of this is wasted time in the least bit. In fact, it is only because of e-mail that I'm able to handle all of this in only an hour or two. Let's imagine what my life would be like if all these contacts had to talk to me on the phone. I would basically have to sit by the phone all day to make myself available to take the calls, and also I would have to deal with constant interruptions. With e-mail, I can handle messages when I want to and actually get other work done. Without e-mail, my productivity would be approximately zero.
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SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Non-time critical?
Hell, I love coming back from a day off, and finding the flood of messages, including the ones from my boss with the subject 'where are you', when he forgot that he granted my leave 2 days ago.
And it doesn't help when people outside my department send me the 5 'urgent' notices to go along with their first request.
Or, my favorite, people who don't understand mailing lists, and so, set up their own distribution lists in their address book, and I have a dozen messages regarding a project I'm no longer assigned to, and even when I do mail people to get them to stop mailing me about it, the next day, someone who was out the day I asked everyone to stop mailing me does a 'reply all' to three of the earlier messages (not reading the whole thread first, and then writing one message), and it starts all over again.
That's not to say that e-mail doesn't have its advantages, but people need to learn how to use it correctly, and not assume that it's a direct replacement for a memos/meetings/phone calls/etc.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Jesus Fucking Christ, I don't believe this. There is not one post yet which points out that in the corporate environment, EMAIL CLIENTS ARE TOYS NOT TOOLS.
Of course workers are getting bogged down in email. They're using Outlook for heaven's sake, or Netscape or Eudora or Notes. These products are the most unspeakably half-assed crap -- I have used all of them extensively, and know whereof I speak -- and it's impossible to manage email in them.
How do they suck? Oh, let me count the ways:
Anything which does formatting (HTML email, etc.) takes longer to render, so you have to pause for that much longer on every message. It's infintessimal on a single message, but it adds up fast when you have 100 messages a day.
The filtering on those products is unforgivably lame. To the extent they manage to filter, they then are helpless to cope with filtered mail.
Speaking of rendering time: they go to all that effort to have snazzy window-y GUIs, and then don't put the power to, say, color code on a filter basis into the hands of the user. Brilliant.
They have no flexibility of identity, which is one part of the equation of functional corporate email. It is imperative that the user be able to specify both Reply-to and From fields in his out going message. If Joe Rep is one of the several people receiving the emails sent to "moreInfo@somecompany.com", he must be able to send email From, or at least Reply-to "moreInfo@somecompany.com".
The concept of filtering as implemented in those packages is the paradigm of paper in cabinets. WHAT THE HELL? It should be possible to put one message in multiple "mailboxes", but only have one actual copy stored -- and the client should tell you where the multiple copies are, and behave sanely if you delete one.
There is no, not one, no, not any of these products with any provision, whatsoever, of the timely retirement of email into archives. Some permit something like manually saving things to archives, but none let you say "this folder, move read messages into that archive after two months". So these email clients are completely unscalable through time. After you have used one for a year, you're drowning in relics, which you want to save but are in your way. The idea that anyone would routinely throw away email is absurd. Diskspace is dirt cheap, there is no excuse. A sane method of archiving is vital -- a method which allows you to "put away" things you're not using, but take them down when they are needed again.
I could (and someday will) go on and on and on about how worthless the tools corporate users are expected to use. But it's not just the mail clients! If you want users to not spam everyone, have a viable place for them to send that info: set up lists and boards sanely, so people use them. Make it easy for people to be added or removed from lists. Have policies in place to handle contractors and temps; it is not sane to expect all important instructions to go over email lists which your temps aren't on, and expect for your temps to know what to do. Duh.
Have aliases or lists for interfacing with the public, so that outsiders don't have to know the name of the relevant person they should contact. "Sales@yourcompany.com" (for example) should go to the right group of people, and every time they respond to one of those emails, everyone else in that group should be notified. Duh.
And, Duh, their email client should prominently clue them into the fact the email they are responding to is not to them personally, but to the "sales" alias.
It all boils down to the fact that corporate email systems -- their configurations from a usability standpoint, and their god-awful clients -- are at best children's toys, not professional tools for getting real work done.
There is no product up to that description, frankly. Meanwhile, we geeks will continue using terminal-based solutions. Some swear by emacs, some by pine. Me, I have a homebrew concoction of nmh, procmail, several bzillion little shell scripts, and my own domain (so I can have all the email addresses I ever want). It's not even close to adequate, but it's so far in advance of corporate toys it's pathetic.
I know that lots of people sneer at geek's tendency to try to solve human problems with technological solutions, but DAMN, this is precisely the kind of problem to be solved technologically.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
I discovered that over 70% of my email is junk (compared to 25% after all my filters were in place). Filtering my mail is the only thing that makes reading my email possible. Well, that and ignoring any message complaining about Karma
Oh! I figured the best way to get CT's attention was to put a catchy subject line, MAKE MONEY FAST or even INSTANT SLASHDOT KARMA. And now I find the reason not one of my submissions has ever made it is because he filters out such great subject lines. Its good to know that he gets 30% legitimate emails, that tops me.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
My company has a very effective way to deal with these messages: `send to all' is locked, except for the internal communications department. If you want to send a message for the general interest, you have to send it to these people and they'll forward it.
We still get snail mail copies of most memo's, but sometimes they just arrive too late.
(The main reason for this policy was a disturbing amount of messages from people who had just quit, and wanted to announce this fact.)
WWTTD?
H. Ounds,
President, Attention Allocation Resources
> We, the upper management of eSourceTec Inc., have discovered that employees have been wasting valuable time dealing with unnecessary e-mail. Here are the steps we are taking to eliminate this waste of time and energy: 1. All employees will be required to attend a series of company meetings on the subject of "Eliminating Unnecessary E-mail." 2. Following these meetings, employees will be required to attend department specific "E-Mail Task Force" meetings to come up with specific strategies for eliminating unnecessary e-mail. 3. Each day, employees will be required to send e-mail to their managers summarizing the amount and type of e-mail they have sent that day, flagging any e-mail exchanges that they feel could have been shortened or eliminated. 4. On a weekly basis, managers will have a one-on-one session with each employee in which they discuss how well e-mail strategies have been implemented, and what new strategies might be employed in the elimination of unnecessary e-mail. > We feel confident that these steps will drastically reduce the amount of time spent each day on pointless and unnecessary tasks, and lead our company into new strata of efficiency.
> Regards, D. R. Baskerville Vice-President, Attention Allocation Resources
(Tackhead's back: Please, God, smite the guy who invented top-posting email and news clients)
Never.
Because if they were, half the PHBs in America would be exposed for the illiterate, dr00ling cretins they are.
On voice mail, nobody knows you can't spell past the sixth grade level.
This friend, let's call him Arp, works for a company big enough that they're in at least two buildings. One day, everyone in the company got a message reading, quite simply:
And that, well, was that.
Apparently there had been a false fire alarm at one building, and in a panic the receptionist was told to have everyone ignore it. She didn't think to filter out the people who worked at a different facility & weren't aware of the alarm, and she didn't take the time to fill in the blank about what, exactly, it is that is not real.
Heh.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I got this message at the beginning of March & I'm still laughing....
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Shouldn't that be 4:20?
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
this is SO TRUE. I worked as a consultant at a company that used Voice mail like most people use EMAIL. Forwarding Voicemails, the whole nine-yards... some voice mails would be 5 or 10 minutes long! I can scan a long message, looking for the 'key' peices of info, in WAY LESS than 5 minutes.
For me, the only alternative to email would be to communicate less.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
spam is actually from our cow-orkers
The sooner we eradicate the cow orkers from our society, the sooner the SPAM problem will be solved!
Perverted bastards....
Open mail relays are how spammers manage to send out thousands of emails, not web-based free email. For some reason there never seems to be a lack of open relays.
I know there's software for this, my ISP used it once on me. The best part is that it said I had an open relay when in reality the Exchange server was already patched. I can't imagine this kind of software being very hard to write. First scan for port 25, get a list of mailservers, run a mail message through to yourself. Once your mailbox is nice and full you can read the headers and send letters to sys admins. I'm sure that part can be automated too.
Imagine if this was the download of the week at Cnet's download.com. Expect lots of network scanning and firewalls going off at first, then a quiet spam free internet.
Then again there are other ways to spread spam without open relays.
Most of the useless mail i get is actually from the company itself. Instead of emailing only a few people, they email a list instead. Sometimes i could see why i might care, but if i don't, it just wastes time.
I found that the easiest way to manage e-mail is to have 3 accounts:
:-P
1. Work account-this is obvious, only give the address to people that will be contacting you for work purposes, maybe family members for emergencies.
2. Home account-at your normal ISP, give this one out to all your friends, family, etc...anyone that wants to BS about how the weather sucks or tell you about their life.
3. Junk account-this is the most important one to me. Get a Yahoo! account or something similar, that way if you get spammed it doesn't matter. Use this address to fill out forms on webpages etc. That way, if there is some e-mail newsletter you are interested in, you can have it sent to that address without interferring with work life or home life.
This may seem obvious to a lot of slashdotters, but if you are careful who you give your addresses to, there shouldn't be a spam problem. This really works, try it. Keeping track of 3 passwords...that's your problem
No shit. I check my regular mail (which is at the front of my apartment building) about once every two weeks.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Thats sort of what we do.
:all.
We have a couple of mailing lists at work set up to handle the "Someone's lights are on" / "free food in the kitchen" emails. And actually, its worked out pretty well.
Every so often someone hits the Reply-To-All button, but for the most part, these list really cut down on the spam/ junk email being sent to
These pretzels are making me thirsty.
I can't decide which is more appealing, the lack of a subject or the reckless use of CAPS LOCK.
Somehow this email reminds me of the Southpark movie . . .
-Peter
A lot (or in slashdot-speak alot) of people are say (to paraphrase) "yeah, but without email you'd have to try to reach people on the phone or in person."
I don't think that anyone is debating the usefulness of email. OTOH, people do things (that in my opinion they shouldn't do) via email that they would NEVER do in person or via phone.
At my last job I'd say I got 40 messages a day that had NOTHING to do with work.
To: Everyone[company name withheld]
Subjects:
"Chili cookoff on Friday!" (Reminder number 12)
"Used mattress for sale."
"Marking newsletter for [today]" (that only marketing people care about. EVERY F---ING DAY!)
To: EveryoneAustin[company name withheld]
"Someone [at the building across town] left their lights on."
"Cake in the breakroom [at the building across town]"
Now, I LOVE email. But Merciful God STOP THESE PEOPLE.
Of course these people think this stuff is important, and think they are doing every one a favor. What they fail to realize is that they are wasting my valuable (slashdot) time.
Anyway, that's my rant.
-Peter
and just pay them per line of code
this has actually been done. frightening, really.
At a former employer, management was constantly extolling the virtues of email and it's benefits to the company.
I suggested if that were true they should pay me per email sent and received..
They declined.
SQLTeam.com - For SQL Server developers and Administrators
On the whole, IT definitely leverages your workforce and makes them more productive -- can you imagine how many jobs would be impossible to do without computers these days?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/18397.ht
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E2 IN2 IE?
I long ago used to use Eudora. I now use Outlook 2001 at work and Entourage (an expanded outlook express for Mac) at home. Most of your comments are not correct, and in fact I'm performing those actions right now.
First of all yes, email should be text. HTML and formating is very bad in an email as outlook allows you to impose YOUR formatting on other people's email, which is extremely stupid. However, I can override this in the options set. I can also force during the install of outlook to have everyone's emails sent in plain text. Most shops don't do this but its what I would do if I ran an IT shop and wanted everyone to only see email they way THEY wanted it to be seen, not the way others did.
I can so control the reply to in Outlook and OE. The option simply doesn't exist in the header of the email window. You have to open another options window and there it is. Kind of annoying interface wise but the functionality is there.
You can so create copies of incoming emails to multiple folders and have the copies treated exactly the way you want. You simply specify a filter to move the email to a folder and you can specify as an additional option to copy it to another folder. You specify as many copies as you want.
As for archiving, if you right click on a folder and select properties, the first option you see is ARCHIVING. I for one use that frequently at work.
There are two reasons why I post this (not for some tech support lesson):
1) To teach you a lesson about knowing your opposition. I know several things about outlook that ARE annoying (like a crappy email search tool). But all of your statements are utterly FALSE and destroy your point.
2) To refute your position because its NOT necessarily the technology any more when it comes to email.
It is our reliance on a technology for communication that has some huge advantages and huge disadvantages over verbal speech, but is drastically different and which people have no idea how to use on so many different levels.
I'll write something on that later... cuz I think the experts referenced in the article have no idea how to use email properly.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Then we would just get another /. article complaining about bloatware.
ÕÕ
ÕÕ
ÕÕ
ÕÕ
I'm watching a NasaTV stream as I'm surfing slashdot, and guess what they're doing?
They're debugging Yuri's Outlook setup. Looks like NT dropped a drive mapping to where Yuri's outlook .pst was, so it remade it's own.
Even in microgravity, email kills productivity and MS sucks. ;)
I use procmail with an accept-list and I get no spam (I define spam as UCE with a forged From header). Here's my .procmailrc.
I mean, for Cisco to trace back to when they did n't use email and use stats from those days to compare to modern day worker productivity, they're going to have to account for a lot more than just the fact that they have email now.
Look, if workers aren't communicating, there's a problem. E-mail is the least obtrusive, most efficient communications method, bar none. I have enough interruptions in my day without Instant Messaging!
Now, if the Gartner Group were to analyze the amount of time IT workers spend reading Slashdot... Ooops! Gotta run, boss is coming!
Never take a beer to a job interview.
* message is (being )?sent (to you )?in compliance
junk.mai
Yes, I name all my mail folders *.mai. It's a VMS holdover habit, what can I say?
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I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
God, I would like to second Tackhead's motion.
..
It can be worse however. My boss, noticing my replies to his messages included his quoted text with interpersed comments (old school usenet style) asked how to do this. Like a fool, I showed him how to quote in the reply & nothing else. Now he sends out quoted replies to everyone with his text in ALL CAPS interpersed WITHIN the text of the quote, like this:
When hell froze over, Joe said this:
> So anyways, I think we should move forward
> with the motion to delinearate the business
> process. I WILL GREEN LITE THIS JOE As soon as
> we can make this happen...
Fuckin annoying
Perhaps not everyone believes in so called "correct" spelling. I know that I don't.
I have always said that its a damned unimaginitive fool who can only think of one way to spell a word.
There is an old phrase "can't see the forrest for the trees". Sometimes little details matter, sure. Spelling isn't one of them. As long as you can read it and get the meaning, thats whats important.
Nothing annoys me more than a person who nitpicks about the smallest details and then goes on to demonstrate that they have no comprehension of the bigger picture.
(especially when its plain that being unable to figure out what word was meant was not actually a problem for them)
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I see. Interesting concept. Probably partially. Still. Even your example is not very hard to read. However, alot of it is bad.
While most of the spelling differences that you used in your example are possible, most are not common ones. They are not the type that most people use. Firstly that is.
Secondly, while many people may use some similar spellings, few use all of them at once, as you did. Also, many of your examples are more examples of typos than creative spelling.
Typos, however, tend to be regular. Things like "teh" for "the". A person who spends alot of time typing has an easy time reading through them.
I am, personally, of the opinion that the time spent proofreading and hunting down such typos that are not caught immediatly (as most are) is wasted time.
As for general lack of education, I think thats a pretty silly assumption to make. This is one specific area which some people accel at where others don't. Its also, when your talking about a persons native language, rooted in very early childhood development. Really has very very little to do with "general education".
The only times that I ever see things spelled so unfortunatly rthat they are AT ALL hard to read is when people, like yourself, purposfully use LOTS of different spellings in rapid succession as an example of why "spelling is important".
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
> Quick question--Is 2+2=5 close enough to be
> acceptable? What about 2+2=3.9? If these are not
> acceptable, then why is "thru" when you mean
> "through"?
Yes. In some situations 2+2 = 5 is close enough. You also make my case for me, you obviously understood that "thru" meant "through" - which is my own sound-alike abreiviation and not a misspelling.
Just like 3.14 is often close enough to pi. Unless you are talking pure math (as oposed to math being applied to solve a problem) then at some level rounding is acceptable.
So yes, sometimes 5 is close enough to 4. Just like in human communication via text, "rounding" is acceptable.
This occurs in 3 ways (that I have identified)
Abreviations:
r u going 2 the mall?
brb afk
IANAL but WYSIWYG
or as I tend to do:
tho thru etc etc. Comes from doing alot
of typing and being lazy. Humans are lazy, and
laziness has nothing to do with education.
If you don't like which things I abreviate, well, then fuck you. If you really want to solve that problem, then I put an offer on the table. You may come here and take dictation to do my typing for me. Then you may use whichever abreviations bother you the least (or none at all).
Typos:
teh and its numerous friends. (usually easy to
catch, and usually caught immediatly after typing.
they happen - again humans are lazy, I do enough typing of various types that, unless I am writting te\chnical text, I don't go back and look for them - they are usually innocuous)
"Misspellings":
English isn't an easy language and has a hundred exceptions to every rule. I shoot for spell-alike if I can and sound-alike if I can't. Works good for me.
> Sorry. I'm not normally this combatitive, but
> your defense of symple lazynes kinda iritated
> mi.)
If other peoples laziness bothers you, then perhaps you should just not read it. Your not doing the typing, so don't criticize how its done.
Or better yet, criticize all you want (you are doing the typing in that case), but you will be either argued with, or ignored.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
From the article:
Seems it's true that people often need reminding of old truths. RFC 1855, section 3.1.3, said just the same back in 1995:
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
The bill S.1618 was introduced in 1998, but didn't make it into law. There's more information on this at SpamCop.
(What's particularly silly about this is that so many of the spammers are outside the US. If, as has happened, I'm in the UK and I get spammed by a guy from the Far East who's faking an address in Latin America, how can what the US Senate might or might not have thought about it be in the least applicable?)
NEVER REPLY, at least, not to the sender. If you do, they'll keep your address on file (and possibly sell it on) because your address is suddenly more valuable for spam-- they'll know there's a real human who's reading mail sent to it. If you really want to complain, you could try mailing abuse@ their ISP: it works, sometimes.
Death to Spam is a good read on the subject. You might also like to check out the alt.spam FAQ.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
Having said that, it can be challenging to deal with a high volume of mail. If you're on Unix, implement a good filter in perl with the Mail::Audit module. Separate stuff addressed to you from lists, so you don't miss an urgent mail while drowning in list traffic. Use an efficient MUA like mutt.
I do wish very much that corporations would instill some basic mail rules in employees, like:
[1] Meaning, a document inflicted on me by others. I've printed out a few program listings and mails.
Instead of filtering IN mail, I filter OUT everything except email from my company's domain and a few other selected domains. Instead of trashing everything else, it goes to another folder where, when I have a few moments, I can scan through easily and decide if any of it's valid - if not I can trash the whole folder with one fell-swoop.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
On the otherside, I'd like to say that Yahoo article was DEFINATLEY junk science.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
I get sometimes spam which claims that this spam isn't even spam. As an evidence for that they post a .signature like that:
This message is sent in compliance with the new email bill section 301. Under Bill S.1618 TITLE III passed by the 105th US Congress, this message cannot be considered SPAM as long as we include the way to be removed, Paragraph (a)(c) of S.1618, further transmissions to you by the sender of this email may be stopped at no cost to you by sending a response of "REMOVE" in the subject line of the email.
What's up with that bill ? Is that true or is it just FUD, a lie ? Since i'm not from the US i don't know anything about their laws.
Anyway, if i reply i only get a "user killed" or something similar...
Any comments about that ?
You look like a million dollars. All green and wrinkled.
I work at a University. As soon as I was hired I was enlisted in 4 mailing lists:(1)my team,(2)my department,(3)college,(4)University level. The problem is that people respond to college and department stuff that was only ment for their them. I can't really filter them out because some is important(ie. a university level salary raise). So if the university complains about waisting time, its their emails that waste my time.
I think CmdrTaco only posted the message that was submitted by someone else. The taco-top is fine.
I am not a lawyer.
An even more recent study shows that *several* hours a day by hackers wasted on /.
go figure?
mr.
The asynchronous method of communicating is almost always best in business. I find that 95% of my questions for someone are not time-critical, and can be handled at the other person's convenience (say, in a day or two), and allow me to keep working without having to interrupt my task to go find the person.
Yet I hear so many people say "Oh, I get 30 messages a day!" I say "Yeah, but those are 30 communications you were going to get anyway, but now you can handle them when YOU want, without the other person having to track you down."
--
Sure, sometimes you need face time. Part of the problem is not knowing which medium to use. Roughly, the rules I use are:
- Intranet site: Information that could be widely useful, but probably not by everyone.
- Email: Simple questions that aren't time critical.
- Phone: Simple questions that are time critical, or the person is far away.
- Face-to-face: Anything involving idea or knowledge creation, or anything involving personal/personnel issues.
- Overhead paging: Only reserved for someone being on fire.
This last one is a pet peeve of mine. I'm so annoyed at how my employers for the past 10+ years have no idea how intrusive overhead paging is, and how 90% of the time it's not as time-sensitive as that sort of immediacy requires.--
Email is great because it improves communication, but some of that improvement is swallowed up by the time it takes to go through all the additional communication, and the overuse of communication because its become so easy to pass on anything you care to think of to everyone in your company. Exercising a little judgement before hitting the Send button can save a company a lot of time. Mine is going through exactly this kind of exercise at the moment and the increase in efficiency is really a "low hanging fruit" in terms of efficiency gains.
Salocin.com
But wait, there's more!
Since a lot of email gateway machines now do address checking of From: headers, newer spamming software picks (randomly, I think) an address from the list to put in the From: header.
That has three effects:
The last time this happened to me, I got over a thousand bounce messages. I immediately documented the hell out of it and reported it to my employer, going to them before they came to me.
An hour a day? Sure, if 'managing email' includes writing recipes to aunt Sally, forwarding the latest virus hoax to EVERYONE YOU KNOW, and deleting all the pr0n spam you get because you surf pr0n at the office.
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
Or you could describe a riculously impossible to implement Rube Goldberg device for karma whore points!
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
People have a lot of email because it is often better than discussing stuff in the halls.
Indeed. My managers are fighting a constant war against "hallway conversations" - well, sort of.
We still feel that hallway conversations are excellent for providing a certainl comfort level of human interaction, but we also feel that hallway conversations suck a bowl of rocks when it comes to clearly specifying and documenting project requirements or work requests.
Email and similar tools make my job possible, and save me insane amounts of time. Of course, I actually bother to optimize these tools - with filters, sorters, and an understanding that most email is unimportant and can be ignored/deleted. This approach saves me even more time, and makes me so productive that I can spend most of my workday posting long-winded rants to /.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
* if workers start to camp outside the office instead of driving each morning to work and back in the evening: no more hours wasted in the traffic jam, which can then be spend on business!
* if workers are only allowed to drink water from bottles they have to bring themselves and have to fill at home (or when they're camping outside the office, with rainwater): no more time is wasted at the coffeemachine or watercooler! Which can then be spend on business and work!
* if businesstrips and meetings weren't done face to face but using email: no more time wasted in hotels/planes/dull offices..
oh wait...
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
I work at Cisco and yes I spend lots of time dealing with email but I have no idea how people come up with these productivity gains. The other night I sent an email (via Inmarsat) to my brother who is running a fish boat somewhere in the middle of the Pacific (actually quite near where Mir crashed). Sure email was lots more effective than swimming from San Jose to New Zealand and delivering a message in a bottle but was it a valid comparison for productivity? Most these productivity comparisons are equally absurd. If it were not for email, I would not have sent a message to my brother- it's not always a productivity issue, it about doing things that might have been difficult to do otherwise. Like collaborating on an open source router that runs on Linux ... :-)
Email is an incredibly efficient means of communication. Senders can compose their thought without taking anyone else's time. They can multicast without getting people in the room or on the phone. All communications can be archived. Recipients can automatically file and prioritize. They can decide what to read, when to read it, when to stop reading. They can delete, file, defer. They can compose a reply to whichever points they wish, along-side the original message, all on their own time. Linux kernel developers probably get (at least) an order of magnitude more mail than the average office worker, but kernel development remains efficient.
Yet companies really do try to curtail email, all because some employees have bad email skills, which sets off the managers who have the old-school intuition that communication should be carefully channelled. This matters because, incredible as it may seem, it will probably affect you sometime. You will find yourself in a situation where there is pressure, or even a dictum, to ration email. To combat this, we must help people use email efficiently.
Unfortunately, I don't know exactly how to do this, because I think the biggest factor is psychological. People who have become comfortable with traditional business environments are used to hearing only what they need to hear. Yes--this includes techies, many of whom expect to think only about their particular domain. They become anxious or confused when they get something that doesn't directly apply to them. They need to learn that 1. skimming this email can be valuable, because they will learn more about related activities in the company, and discover unexpected ways in which they can advise or contribute; and 2. deleting or filing messages without reading them can be ok.
Has anyone seen an "email skills" approach that worked?
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
how, and in which gory fashion, did CmdrTaco blow up his laptop?
And with their usual zeal, American CEO's decide that politeness is a waste of productivity, deciding en masse that it must be rooted out to get a nice 2% more time out of their employees' workday.
---
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Hmm, see my e-mail address above? Sure, go ahead, spam it, I don't really give a shit, hehe, if you DARE to spam it. Hell, even I fear typing that e-mail address in. I've found that the solution to spam is to get THE MOST OFFENSIVE e-mail address possible and use that address in any public forum or on any list that you just know is gonna get spam.
::cough:: AIM ::cough::
My main e-mail account gets mabye two or three pieces of spam a month, and even alot of those I technicaly signed up for and are occasionaly usefull. I also have a 3rd e-mail address that I check every few days that is for semi-serious e-mail. I use it for things like asking tech support questions and what not. Situtations where I don't want to piss someone off, but I just know that the company in question is going to sell off my e-mail address, hehe
Filters? Why, I don't get any e-mail that I don't want. Well, that and I am such a friggin fast reader (comes from the BBS days, hehe, sorting through messages was a NECCISARY skill, MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!) that I can easily manualy sort through 200 or so messages in under 5 minutes, under 2 minutes if neccisary.
When I am in a really pissy mood I just go about and randomly delete messages from my inbox to lighten the load, heh, some risks, yes, but hell, it also helps to communicate the general "I don't give a fuck about you I'm an apathedic asshole" attitude that helps to keep people away.
Not to surprisingly, it works in real life too, heh, people do not often fuck with me (well, except for the REALLY stupid ones) because I pretty much have that Evil Eye thing down pat, heh.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I have a little Perl program that does all of my filtering based on rules in a block file. Bascially, if the mail is not directly sent to me, or it's not in my block/pass list, then it gets dumped into a "potential-spam" folder (you can just send it to /dev/null if ya want.)
Here's the program: spamfilter.pl
Here's an example block file: conf/block.conf
Email me if you have any problems with it, or have questions.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Email massively improves productivity.
Most middle managers spend all day emailling their friends and contracting email viruses rather than irritating the socks off the engineers in extremely long boring meetings.
Anything that takes up manager time is bound to improved productivity.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
A lot of our customer's are in Canada's Bible Belt (Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Mission -- British Columbia), and let me tell you: you haven't heard moral outrage until you've heard an offended Xtian mother complain about receiving Hot Slippery Teens in her mailbox...
Carousel is a lie!
I had a manager who was clueless about email; he
1) always included the original
2) never trimmed, even when ">"'s got 10 & 15 deep
3) his comments were always at the bottom.
We all hated him, and when his kids start using email, they will probably hate him too.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Pretty handy, though. And I don't have to waste more time to set up the filters anymore.
============
============
Mathematics will always come back to hunt you down, in so many ways
----
----
We, the upper management of eSourceTec Inc., have discovered that employees have been wasting valuable time dealing with unnecessary e-mail. Here are the steps we are taking to eliminate this waste of time and energy:
1. All employees will be required to attend a series of company meetings on the subject of "Eliminating Unnecessary E-mail."
2. Following these meetings, employees will be required to attend department specific "E-Mail Task Force" meetings to come up with specific strategies for eliminating unnecessary e-mail.
3. Each day, employees will be required to send e-mail to their managers summarizing the amount and type of e-mail they have sent that day, flagging any e-mail exchanges that they feel could have been shortened or eliminated.
4. On a weekly basis, managers will have a one-on-one session with each employee in which they discuss how well e-mail strategies have been implemented, and what new strategies might be employed in the elimination of unnecessary e-mail.
We feel confident that these steps will drastically reduce the amount of time spent each day on pointless and unnecessary tasks, and lead our company into new strata of efficiency.
Regards,
D. R. Baskerville
Vice-President, Attention Allocation Resources
If you don't want my koalas, baby, don't shake my eucalyptus tree.
This was actually tried in a few places, with the predictable results. One that I'm aware of even counted comments, which resulted in the most extensively documented code in the history of programming (notice I didn't say 'best' documented code).
When reading email, I also tend to skimread first and then dig deeper for any relevant details. And I'm somewhat used to automatically filtering out anything irrelevant, like re-re-re-quoted material. What does slow me down when reading email is that it's often plagued by errors in spelling, grammar and even basic punctuation.
I'm also not terribly long-winded when I myself send out email. I make sure my spelling is correct - again, I'm fortunate in this regard as far as natural skills are concerned. I think that overall, each second extra spent when composing an email saves at least two seconds at the recipient's end.
Plenty of jobs require you to have good communications skills, and "telephone skills" are often cited as necessary when a job is advertised. I wonder when "email skills" (you could even say "written word skills"!) will receive as high a priority?
All said, the file is in text file format and is a simple list of spammer addresses, which I am sure someone could convert/import to the format needed.
The nice thing is that people send him the names of spammers. And so it is constantly updated.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
--
I own my own domain domain.com
I have all mail (*@domain.com) forward to my real account. When I sign up at latimes.com and they want my email address, I tell them latimes.com@domain.com. Ditto for ebay and the others. When ebay screwed me over, I configured sendmail to bounce any email addressed to ebay.com@domain.com.
It's fun too, because you can see which companies sell your email address... (latimes.com is the only one I've caught so far). I no longer live in fear of spam.
While this might work for organisations, can't see spammers adopting it though :)
fff
Classic "misuse of e-mail" situations: 1. two workers, sitting exactly one cubicle apart, exchange e-mail about a project/meeting/presentation. Why? Because they want to avoid having to confront one another and gasp, actually make eye contact. 2. CYA - Cover your Ass. Document the heck out of every thing you do in the office. And what better tool than e-mail to do this (Bill: Bob, this is to confirm the receipt of your mail in response to my mail about the excess hours reported on the time sheet. Bob: Bill, re your mail about my response to your mail about the time sheets...ad infinitum) 3. Imprecise communication - "did you say the conference call was at 8:30AM CST or EST?" 4. Oops- forgot the attachment! 5. Revised version of the last budget spreadsheet - ignore the previous version. 6. Reply All 7. Bcc your boss on every little thing 8. Accidental "to all employees" type mail shots 9. Intentional "to all employees" type mail shots - "w.e.f April 21, no more pizzas", "w.e.f Jan 1, all expenses shall be..." blah blah blah. Most office communication should be done face to face or over the phone, not e-mail. Really important issues are *always* communicated in person.
(spam it to me me at "test2201@hotmail.com", the default hotmail filters move 66 % to bulk(=spam) mail. > 10 msd per day).
But it seems spammers have worked arround this by linesniffing. If your account gets older more and more leaks occur. I wonder how people on highly visible web sites manage. Is there any GOOD antispam software that can handle multiple pop3 accounts?
If there is a return addres i do send them a reply, of coarse with a fake email adress. They take my time --> i take time from them. I try to prevent accessing web sites since they might get paid for every hit. And hey, i already know where to find porn on the internet.
My whole damn day is spent emailing!
sulli
RTFJ.
Is it me, or is this just a blatant ad for Cisco? "Yay, we're Cisco, look how efficient we can be, blah, blah, blah..."
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
That particular trick is called: a DOS-attack.
Urd.
Anyway, I think there is a method to successful email management:
1. use filters (server based filtering like procmail works best but use whatever you can get your hands on.)
2. clean and review your filters regularly (otherwise you will end up filtering something you wanted to keep around.)
3. do not check out the spam you get (this usually just solicits more spam.)
4. check your mail regularly (it's better to spend 5 times 5 minutes a day reading/replying then spending an hour. This will help you stay focussed.)
5. Be critical (after the 5th email with a guy, take the phone and end the discussion that way.)
6. Once a month, throw the old trash out. (Keeping your mail spools to reasonable size will improve your chances of finding relevant information in it!)
7. If you're on a mailing list you'd like to get off: unsubscribe (try it, it usually works.)
8. Be carefull who you give your email address to.
Happy mailing!
Urd.
Most people can't use filters. Excluding the high usage of Linux/BSD/Unix among Slashdotters, a lot of people use Outlook Express and AOL. I'd love to get filters in OE, but as far as I know it doesn't have them. What I'd really like is for the company that makes the mail server software I use to include the ability to filter based on a server being in the RBL.
D.R. Baskerville Vice-President, Attention Allocation Services
Most employees I know would say that about 50% of the meetings they attend are unnecessary, and that only 10% of the discussions I hear in meetings demand any of my attention at all. Any dissenting opinions? No?
E-mail is a huge advantage, then, in that it gives me the power to delete memos and announcements that aren't important to me in just a few seconds, instead of having to throw away dead trees or walk in and out of useless meetings that do the same.
I say, viva la company e-mail. We'll always have to deal with useless intra-office crap, but at least with e-mail we can deal with it in the most efficient and least wasteful way possible (well, unless you're the network administrator).
I think most of us would actually pay for better filtering capabilities in our email client. It would be nice to go weeks on end with out modifiying my filter to catch the latest gimick.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more. - Albert Camus
This question is somewhat related to the subject.
I've had the same e-mail address for quite a few years now and I recieve more spam than actual messages I want/expect. Most of the spam I get is from accounts at hotmail or whatever simmilar service. Some spammers seem to have scripts to create multiple accounts on these sites and abuse them quite easily.
I was wondering, since Napster's been accused of knowingly providing technology that facilitates illegal activity, couldn't the same logic be applied to free e-mail services? I mean, spam is illegal right? Couldn't a lawsuit force them to enforce certain restrictions that would minimize the abuse of their systems, thus minimizing the overall quantity of junkmail we get...
?
--- Worst tagline ever.
The primary problem with email isn't the content of it, nor the quantity of it, it's purely the sorting. For example several of the postings in here have taken offense to emails regarding "frivilous" things, etc. Personally I filter them to particular folders. If the email is to the entire company or branch I know it is of limited importance so it goes to the particular folder (I'm using Outlook rules, though any real client does this) and that node in the tree will be darker until I have some spare time and browse through them. If it's from my boss it goes to another folder where I immediately check them. If it's marked low priority it goes to the folder that I get around to when I'm ready for some mental downtime (i.e. jokes, etc.).
Email is a fantastic savings in organization, and with the proper use of filtering, and importance flags email can be non-intrusive for most people.
I had a manager who was clueless about email; he
1) always included the original
I agree with the other points, however including the original is hardly a sin, especially when the situation that this conversation is about occurs (i.e. email overload). I had a coworker who apparently didn't know what Reply was, so each of his replies would be fresh new messages. Occasionally he'd reference the subject in the title, though not always (and it wasn't always completely clear even when he did). Each time I'd get a message from him I'd have to do a sort of all sent messages so I could synchronize what exactly he was replying to.
Yes, employees may spend several hours a day writing, reading and managing email, but what are the alternatives??? - pick up the phone every time you need to talk to someone? get out of your desk and hunt people down in person? write paper "memos" and distribute them by hand? write snail mail letters? Email provides us with a way to communicate with other *when we want to*. I can send 100 people in my organization an email message in just a couple of minutes. The person doesn't have to be sitting at their desk to receive the message...they can pick it up whenever they sit back down. So while we may be spending hours a day on email, you really can't call this "lost time" as there are clear (but often immeasurable) increases in productivity when email is used as an effective communications medium.
M$ would have gotten the joke back in 1978 . . .
There is a heaven on earth...
Mr. Ska
I slit a sheet
A sheet I slit
Mr. Ska
Sownds too mi lyke yore tryng to maik excoosez fur yore lak uv spellink abilitee and genural lak of edumakashun.
For starters...
In this post, you seem to have a problem with the fact that I used uncommon misspellings. However, in your original post you stated "...long as you can read it and get the meaning, thats whats important."
I believe that you were able to to get my meaning. Correct?
Continuing...
In your original post you also state "Nothing annoys me more than a person who nitpicks about the smallest details and then goes on to demonstrate that they have no comprehension of the bigger picture."
It seems to me that you are nitpicking on the fact that I used so many misspelled words in one place. Who cares how many I use as long as you get the meaning?
And...
I'll agree that some of the "creative spelling" that I used could be constued as examples of typos, but I don't understand your statement, "A person who spends alot of time typing has an easy time reading through them."
How do you connect typing a lot with reading?
As for the general education part...
You're probably right. It was a silly assumption to make based on your first post. Can I make it from your first combined with your second?
-"purposfully" (Add an "e")
-"alot" (a lot)
-"immediatly" (Add an "e")
-"accel" (excel?)
-"I am, personally, of the opinion that the time spent proofreading and hunting down such typos that are not caught immediatly (as most are) is wasted time" (This sounds just plain lazy and ridiculous to me. If you are too lazy to double check your work, you'd be too lazy to work for me.)
Quick question--Is 2+2=5 close enough to be acceptable? What about 2+2=3.9? If these are not acceptable, then why is "thru" when you mean "through"?
(Sorry. I'm not normally this combatitive, but your defense of symple lazynes kinda iritated mi.)
But wait:
workers spend an average of 49 minutes per day managing e-mail....34 percent of the internal business e-mail they receive is unnecessary
Um, the reporter (or maybe it's the actual Gartner people) needs to take a remedial math class. 34% times 49 minutes is 17 minutes per day, not remotely "nearly an hour". Presumably the other time spent managing e-mail is productive. I know plenty of people who waste more than 17 minutes a day smoking or chatting by the water cooler or exchanging pleasantries on the phone or reading the sports section in the men's room. What's the big deal here?
Yes, some people use e-mail really inefficiently. I think all managers should train employees two fundamental principles of e-mail etiquette:
I expect that those two guidelines alone would eliminate 90%+ of the "wasted" time.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Hilarious! As someone who used to work in close proximity to MBA sales & marketing guys, I always crack up over MBA bashing. I believe it was IBM in the early '80s that paid by the line (no evidence, just heard it from a university prof).
My favourite (most-hated?) middle manager quote I've heard: "The code is already written, you just have to find the source of these bugs. It should only take a couple hours." Naturally, this was in a 20,000+ line application (written by a dyslexic C programmer who used GOTOs).
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
Aw, c'mon Mr. Moderator sir, this was not a troll. Off-topic, yes. Over the heads of many readers, maybe. Not quite funny enough to get a +1 mod, maybe. But save your troll mods for the M$ apologists ;)
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
Would it be a waste of time to set up 2 mail servers in a company? One would be for internal communications and the other one for internet mail only (with a block rejecting stuff from the same company to prevent it being used for internal mail). I think this could be used to manage spam and keep internal mail from being abused as policies could be set up on the internal mail and MAPS could be used for external mail. I would vote for it. It would keep my official business box from being plugged up.
The truth shall set you free!
Check out SpamCop http://www.spamcop.net You can use it for free to report spam. If you sign up for the pay service, they'll filter your email for you. It has cut down the spam I receive by about 95%.
but it ain't email! If someone really wants to get the geeks working, they'd implement a NetNanny style filter for /.
Having lots of mail is extremely useful on the job. For example, at my last job, my schedule would go like this:
12:00 Get to work (I have classes, so I was allowed to be late) drop my cds in my office, turn on my computer
12:15 Go on break with friends, recount last days events
12:45 Go back to office, check mail
1:15 Go on break, talk about email and office rumors
1:45 Go back to office and eat lunch
2:15 Cigarrette break
2:45 Reread mail to make sure I didn't miss anything
3:15 Look for work
3:30 Cigarrette break
3:45 Try to find a manager to get work to do
4:15 Found manager, got work
4:30 Break
4:45 Begin working
5:00 Leave unfinished work for tomorrow
5:15 Break
5:45 Relax
6:15 Read email sent today
6:45 Turn off computer
7:00 Break
7:45 Go home
If it wasn't for email, I would've had to actually work
Just yesterday I read a simialr article on IDG.net - it's about how most our spam is actually from our cow-orkers and friends. Aparently they have no idea of what's important or not ;) :)
At least I get fewer emails with 2mb powerpoint presentations than I did last year
Give it a read!
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
this leads to unobfuscated code, though..
//set x equal to
//zero
//i.e. 1 - 1 + 2 - 4 + 1 +3
//set x equal to 2x - x
x = (x > 10) ? 0 : x;
to
if(x > 10)
{
x = 0;
}
else
{
x = x;
}
See that nice waste of space? And those VERY helpful comments. Oh, well... I`m not paying for storage space...
My other car is first.
I found a little trick you can do by creating a rule in Outlook Express.
Just make a rule that says if the text "in the subject line" appears anywhere in the message, to automatically delete it. A lot of emails come with that "to be removed, reply to this email with REMOVE in the subject live".
I've found that it works pretty well.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
Because, for all the d(Technology)/d(t) tends to something big, human nature is a constant. Folks like other folks, for all they simultaneously hate them. Gadgetry in moderation, please.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Much of the useless email is not pesonal correspondence as much as it is a bulletin announcement. In one group I worked in we set up a news server for this type of thing. We'd subscribe to topics we needed or wanted to monitor. It eliminated hundreds of copies of email each week.
The office email systems need to provide an easy, alternate interface to allow people to set up such bulletin boards/news groups within their organization, perhaps even setting up personal or arbitrary group posting areas. It would eliminate mass mailing and message bloat that comes with forwarding.
- Sig this!
you forgot to mention where they call you and say "Hey Todd! I was wondering if you could call me back, I have a question about my email."
.kb
Instead, they could've said "Hey Todd!, How do you open email?" and I could've called them back and said "doubleclick m$ product", instead, I have to talk to the person for 20 hours on what they did since they woke up out of bed to resolve an icon problem.
Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right-- But They Make Me Feel A Whole Lot Better
Wrong intoxicant! Today's 4/20 - smoke some pot!
Unless you're applying to a brewery.
PS - It's 4/20 - smoke a joint today!
Managing Email is PART OF THE WORK we do. This is like saying Java wastes time Garbage Collecting, or Linux users waste time compiling their kernal. Without email productivity falls. Managing it is an integral part of using it in the first place.
I created a new email adress on my domain name, and tested to see whether or not i would still get spam to it, even though i hadn't advertised or provided the address to anyone. Low and behold, a couple of weeks later, i was getting spam!!! I must be cursed, the gods of mail are frowning upon me!
More and more, businesses are realizing the importance of the informal networks within a company (as opposed to the formal org chart.) As stated in The Cluetrain Manifesto, business is conversation, both within the company and between company and its customers. Email is the killer app for the Internet because it facilitates these conversations. Just as in real life, not all conversations are especially useful. But that's okay. You get clues about who people are and how they like to communicate, even if the substance of the message isn't on target.
I'll grant that anything can be abused, including time at the water cooler. Some email netiquette would go a long way to reducing the problem. But having said that, I think that on balance, letting people be people and communicate like people may seem to be wasting time, but it's not really. It's building a community.
True, sometimes. We used to have a corporate VP whose memos sounded worse than an impromptu Bush speech. The top (and only) MIS guy here finally printed one out, edited it with blue and red pencil for spelling, grammar, and nonsense, and posted it on his office door. He didn't know the VP was about to fly up here for a visit...
Remarkably, that VP is long gone, and the MIS guy is still here. 8-)
>>For some reason there never seems to be a lack of open relays.
I happen to agree with you. I get hit by this one spammer every tuseday for the past 2+ years. The e-mail style is always the same. What I have been doing every tuseday is tracing the e-mail to the open relay and then send an e-mail & call to the sytem operator. It's worked very well. And system operators are very friendly about this.
My question is. Is there a way that I could run a scan to find these open relays. I would love to take a segment of the internet and run the scan and issue an advisiory to the system operators. I bet I could check a few thousand IP addresses per week. Maybe I could even form a group that does different sections.
any advise is welcome
ONEPOINT
spambait e-mail
my web site artistcorner.tv hip-hop news
please help me make it better
if you see me, smile and say hello.
I feel sorry for the blokes that actually bit into this shit that piles up in our boxes. Seriously, it MUST be working well enough for people to spend the time and money doing it, AND risk any fines assosciated with spamming.
/. is, I'm talking to a bunch of Base and Goat-heads), STOP BUYING THIS SHIT AND THE SPAM WILL STOP. You're MAKING it work!
If someone sends out 1,000,000 messages, and only 2 act on selling their timeshare or vaction home (or whatever it is), they'll start to get the message that "Whoa, this doesn't work". But when a few thousand act on it, they're like "Sweet, cheaper than advertising!"
So to those shitheads out there (who probably have no clue what
This is really kinda strange. I spend 50-60% of my day on the Internet. I fill out so many forms that require your name, it would make your head spin. My emal address is posted on hundreds of assorted web sites. I don't use filters, and I rarely delete email. I thought this was a recipe for spam, but I get none. No spam. Strange, isn't it?
Elmo knows where you live!
You're a geek superstar... it comes with a price. stop bitching. ;-)
--
$ chown -R us:us yourbase
I've just changed my email program to Kmail, KDE mail program. It has a great feature, the ability to bounce emails. I have a public email, every time someone put me in a public mailling list of jokes or something like that, I bounce the message and they think the email is invalid.
The big guy at the top has a stupid idea. He has a PC at his desk. He sends the idea via email to his subordinates. They spawn it to the underlings beneath who do the same ,,,etc.
It finally reaches everyone in the corporation and
along the way has been BCC and re-worded numerous times. Comments like AWESOME, FANTASTIC, WE GOTT DO THIS, ad nauseum have been added via kiss-ass mode guppies and bimbo "take my body" chicklets til its 10 times its previous size.
Hours even days of productivity are wasted and the big guy or whoever thinks he has the importance to actually make a decison has even forgotten the idea and if someone brings it up he kills it as stupid. More emails are generated as a result.
The game continues for weeks with more interspersed stupid email brainfarts. Only the few souls in IT have no time to even open their mail actually do some productive work and keep the organization running. The rest of the drones are useless except to croon and curry favor with the
upperlings up the food chain.
This is part of the reason for the dotcom scenario
and why it burst and why it will be back.
Solution: Remove or render useless the PC on the desk of the upperling/s. Most useless dorks will then transfer out or quit in confusion or fear of being found out. This WILL NOT HAPPEN.
Lets talk about American High..duhhhhhh wat dat?
RC
Turns out, the boys at the top are mostly a bunch of petty, illiterate maroons.
Let's eliminate email, so that all those employees will instead spend that nearly an hour a day talking to the people they used to email!!
We've got MBA's and we're brilliant!!!
Why do those engineers think they have to communicate with each other to write code? Silly engineers. We should keystroke monitor them to see how much code they're writing per minute, and just pay them per line of code. God it's great to be a middle manager!
Mired: To cause to sink or become stuck in or as if in mire Mire: An area of wet, soggy, muddy ground; a bog. I believe it is a metaphor.
Do a google search before posting.
I think the problem really comes down to mass distribution being (essentially) free for email. The ammount of physical junk mail you get presumably has limits based on the fact that it actually costs these people something (even if it's small) to send it to you. I think the trick is to use email for person to person communications, and avoid mass distribution entirely. I get about 3 email messages a day. None of it is spam.
friends don't let friends teleport drunk
and being asynchronous, it's a lot more convenient... i could babble on endlessly like my college professor about communication medium theory, but we can all grasp a dozen quick reasons why email is just a damn cool way of groking with your fellow man or woman, and better than the telephone, snail mail, homing pigeon... plus, who can live without emoticons?
;-) :-P 8-(
uh, don't answer that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
this whole thing about productivity and email reminds me of the paradox economists were talking about with the introduction of the personal computer into the workplace back in the '80s... a lot of them were like, "ok, companies are spending gazillions on hardware and infrastructure and educating employees, and productivity is stagnant if not going down" even though your brain screams, "duh! what, you want to go back to typewriters and pneumatic tubes?" ;-P
;-)
but with the introduction of the pc, it was just a delayed reaction sort of thing... invest some time and energy, and a decade or so later you got the internet
same arguments can be made over email i think: email has already infiltrated itself so far into the common culture and daily life and kids use it from the age of 5 and up that our feelings about email probably will eventually become less like "i spend two hours a day on email... what's going on?" and more like "i spend two hours a day on email... duh!"
just ask yourself what that hour or two hours spent on email would be like on the telephone or letter-writing: four hours? eight hours? more? sure, we spend a lot of time on email like no other communication medium before, but that's not because it's this new annoyance getting in the way of living life well, but really because suddenly we can be more productive unlike any way we ever could before email existed
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it