Why Email is a Bad Collaboration Tool

An anonymous reader writes "Isaac Garcia follows up his popular "The Good in Email" article with "The Bad in Email or (Why Steve Ballmer is the CTO of Microsoft)": "In spite of email's universal success (as a collaboration tool), and in spite of its many good traits, email contains deep, inherent flaws that force users and markets to seek alternatives to collaborating via email."

Comments

Amen

[eldavojohn]

Email Communications Do Not Correspond Priority
If everyone used Outlook (70% of Central Desktop users use Outlook), then the ability to assign priority to each message would actually work. But we don't live in a Microsoft world (in spite of what many of you might think) and instead, we usually measure and weigh the importance of an email message by the number of people included in the carbon copy. This is highly subjective and fails to address the need to order and sort messages and task by importance.

One alternative is to use ALL CAPS IN YOUR MESSAGE TO IMPLY PRIORITY.

I can attest to that. Send me an e-mail via the Microsoft Outlook Exchange servers at work. But don't just send it regular style, send it in Outlook with the super duper maxi-ultra-important urgent need flag (the little red '!') enabled. Yeah, on top of that, make it required that the user send a response (thank you, Microsoft).

Wait a few minutes ... or maybe an hour. I'll get back to my desk and see a notice that I'm 13 hours overdue to read your message (they've managed to somehow attach a meeting notice to it and insert it in my calendar for yesterday at noon without me knowing) that I missed the funniest super bowl commercial last night. And then put everything in caps.

Yeah, I think I'd pretty much wait for you in the parking lot after work. And I wouldn't be there to give you a hug, ifyaknowwhatimean.

Oh, by the way, my boss has it somehow set to default that it's urgent and he needs a response once I've read it. Same with his secretary. Urge to kill rising ... rising ...

Re:Amen

[ArsenneLupin]

Our local Spamfilter is configured in such a way that it bounces messages containing the header X-MSMail-Priority: high.

Problem solved.

Another alternative would be to greylist them with a delay of 2 days, hehe...

Re:Amen

[curecollector]

For colllabortion between more than 2-3 people

Great typo - seriously. You've inadvertantly invented a term that has accurately described more workplace collaborative efforts than I care to remember. Thanks!

Re:Amen

[Brewskibrew]

I used to have a manager who sent all his e-mails with read receipts, even low priority messages like status reports and "there's cake at the secretary's desk" messages. Rather than mark them read, I used to move them all (in their unread state) to a subfolder. Once a month or so, I would do a "Select All" and then "Mark Read", flooding his Inbox with dozens and dozens of read receipts. It took a couple of months of this passive agression, but he stopped using the read receipts by default.

Re:Amen

[timster]

I once got an email marked "low priority" from a soft-spoken accountant. If that man ever sends me anything marked "high priority", I will flee the building.

Re:Amen

[Em7add11]

We have a guy here who not only has his read-receipts turned on, but he has his sending address set as the group email address for our entire department.

So now everybody here gets notified when his emails are being read.

Re:The Real Problem

[Rob T Firefly]

Could you explain your post further? All I got was "the."

Re:The Real Problem

[snarkh]

He said something about Salshdot replacing e-mail.

Re:Wait a second...

[Anonymous Coward]

CTO = chair throwing officer?

Re:Better email

[Fred_A]

I don't think anything that is displayed on the screen is encrypted.

Maybe the programmers figured the people wanted to read the mail once it got delivered...

Vested interest?

[john-da-luthrun]

IMHO a simple improvement to email would be no more than twice a day delivery.

Let me guess. You have stock in fax machine manufacturer?