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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."
An intelligent user of email considers whether sending an email is appropriate for the communication at hand. That's the way it is with so many tools--they're often misused, but that doesn't mean they don't still have their proper place.
What I mean by silo'ed is that email traps information into personalized, unsharable, unsearchable vacuums where no one else can access it - the Email Inbox. Think of your Email Inbox as a heavily fortified walled garden. Not mentioning the difficulties many have accessing their Email Inbox outside the corporate firewall, the Email Inbox contains a hodgepodge of business, personal and private information that most people do not want to share with others.
Unfortunately, the Walled Gardens of our Email Inboxes are deceivingly warm and cozy. This feigned-comfort of safety whispers into our ears like a wily devil to, "Just email the document to me" or "Just email that document to yourself" with the false-belief that it will remain safe, secure and locked away. But that is just it......its locked away so that NO ONE ELSE CAN ACCESS IT. This is counter-culture to team collaboration.
And how many times have you sent out a document for comment and gotten back 30 different versions with markups, which you then have to reintegrate into one document and somehow handle inconsistencies and overlap? Then of course you need the document, but don't have a copy where you're at, so you retrieve one from an email and use that, but it's an old version, so you have to recreate revisions. And then someone always emails you their revisions late, after you think you're all done (usually it's your boss, so it's not like you can just leave them out).
If nothing else, you need a document collaboration tool, to avoid this nightmare of multiple files, and email is not it.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
From the article:
The single worst trait of email is that it's silo'ed.
Then he says:
For many folks, the Email Inbox contains their most intimate secrets all mashed together into a single location: business correspondences, contracts, proposals, reminders, tasks, love letters, indiscreet online purchases, dirty jokes, pictures of your spouse (and kids), time-wasting games, inappropriate messages from co-workers and friends and lets not forget spam.
To me it seems like the perfect argument for why email should be silo'ed, and that it's one of the reasons why it is still so popular. I completely agree with his comment that there is a wealth of information hidden within emails that others could/would find useful. However, there obviously is even more that most would find useless or that the inbox owner wouldn't want visible. To me email represents the best, if flawed compromise. If the inbox owner wants to, they can redistribute their emails to a wider audience. This can be done by forwarding, or in Outlook, simply dragging the email to a public folder. I think the alternative approach, assume that everything is public and force the user (either sender or receiver) to selectively "hide" or "target" emails falls too far on the "other side" for most companies.
A fairly insightful article, but it misses a couple of points:
It's difficult (if not impossible) for the average user to discern who an e-mail is actually from. Most people have no idea about message headers or IP addresses. It is trivial to send e-mail spoofing the address, and have 95% of people unquestioningly believe it's from the address you specify. This is one of the biggest and easiest to exploit weaknesses in e-mail.
E-mail is incredibly easy to ignore. Really, really, really easy. Claiming you didn't receive an e-mail is a get-out to any number of problems in collaborative projects, mostly because it's so common - it's fairly easy for an e-mailto not get to its recipient, be it an over zealous spam-filtering policy, a misconfigured mail server somewhere along the line or a lack of space on a company intranet (combined with badly configured mail servers which are relatively common).
I believe the problem with Email is usually only 10% of what you are trying to communicate is actually understood.
Sort of like posting on slashdot..... :-)
I know your joking but you're absolutely correct. This is a very serious problem with e-mail and why using the phone should be prefered over it. You see, when you're speaking to someone face to face or even over the telephone a lot of the information is contained in the delivery. Your body language and intonation help to create context and help the message get across to the listener.
E-mail, by contrast has none of this. Writing an e-mail that your audience will understand first time - both in tone and in content - takes considerable effort and skill. E-mails are often not considered fully. Hands up if you've sent an e-mail quickly and realised the tone of the e-mail makes it sound very hard and demanding? I suspect most of us have!
Because writing clear e-mails is difficult, people often resort to writing bullshit instead. The idea being is that if you can bedazzle the recipient enough with your buzzwords and other pseudo-words that they feel inferior and are unlikely to ask for clarification.
Why do we need software to collaborate? Humans have always collaborated best when sat around a table talking to each other. In my opinion, the software solves a problem that would be better solved by taking the time to see each other in the flesh.
It may be expensive but it's less expensive than getting it wrong and ruining the reputation you had with your client.
Simon
Crap. Crap. Crap.
Good, now that that's out of my system, I'll explain.
Email WITHIN my domain is guaranteed. Honest. If someone (say joe@jupiter.lan) sends mail (to, say, jane@earth.lan), its going through.
If joe@jupiter.lan sends mail to peter@scrape_me.com (whatever), it is rewritten to joe@scrape_this.com, and forwarded to forward_this_shite.net.
After which IT ISN'T MY RESPONSIBILITY. If it can't be forwarded on, it WILL be returned to joe@jupiter.lan. Once accepted, though, I don't care. Not my network. And this makes the world go around.
If there are problems within your LAN or your system, its your responsibility. The original Unix just dropped the mail into the file system. Which is as reliable as the file system. No delivery issues. Linking networks together; as reliable as the linking/forwarding services used.
I can't and won't be responsible for other peoples networking and administration skills.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Part of this article drives me nuts, and I see the same crap in /. comments all the time:
2. The data is often 'NSFW' (Not Safe For Work).
Why did he use the acronym if he defines it directly after use. The only reason he should do this is if he used 'NSFW' elsewhere in the article, which he does not. The writer should decide whether he feels this acronym is recognizable enough to use without a definition. If it is then use it, otherwise don't!
Fixed:
2. The data is often not safe for work.
nothing
Use registered post. Seriously. IP itself is unreliable. The Internet is reliable in the sense that the global network does not go down even if some sites (or backbones) do.
Modern email is pretty much reliable. What is not reliable is the "business" need driven content filters which cause mail to disappear.
SMTP is best effort, and that effort is very, very good. End users can make the best efforts of clued administrators fail.
Reject my email if you think it is spam. Don't filter it out, because then I have no feedback (and no, read receipts aren't acceptable).
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
In fact, SMTP offers a number of secure alternatives, included TLS within an otherwise unencrypted pipe, or SMTP/SSL on port 463. POP and IMAP both support TLS for 110/143, as well as POP3S/IMAP4S over 995/993, and have not required plain-text login since the introduction of capabilities negotiation more than a decade ago -- both of them support a version of the AUTH verb. (To give you a sense of time, the relevant RFC's were published before Netscape developed SSL v1, back when sending creds over the wire in clear text was completely standard.)
The guy's trying to sell something, but it would help if he could sell things without lying about them.
Thunderbird would spread like wildfire if it could do secure, guaranteed (to arrive, or notification if not) email.
It can. For many people, it does. Also, you're confusing a client issue (secure content) and an only partially client issue (secure delivery) with pure server issues (guaranteed delivery) which the client should not and in fact cannot address. And that issue is solved anyway, in SMTP, for what, 30-some years now?
-- Old Man Kensey
Most senders I've received E-mails from assume I received and read the mail within 5 minutes of their sending it. Scheduling a meeting for 20 min after sending the mail notification is rediculous, or sending it right at the end of the workday (or later) and assuming I'm so eager to read it I access my work E-mail from home. If its that important PHONE ME! Just because you sit all day at your desk with your E-mail open doesn't mean I do, two way communication is the only way to confirm a message is received.
Winston Churchill once said "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." You could say the same thing about email as a collaboration tool -- it sucks, but for the average user it sucks less than every other option.
None of these objections are so large that they can't be overcome; many people use the tools above successfully. But for the average user, who accepts defaults and isn't interested in learning a new skill just to organize a meeting, they all have flaws that outweigh the flaws of e-mail.
I hate collaboration-by-email as much as the next guy, but until we can come up with something that is an order of magnitude better for the average user right out of the box, we shouldn't be surprised if they keep shooting e-mails around. (sigh)
Read my blog.
One of the benefits of email is that new mail waits in a mail box for me to look at when I am ready. I take advantage of this by disabling any new mail messages. No flashing, no popups and no noise. That way I can focus on my current task; checking my mail only when I am ready.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
I do wonder why you sound so bitter about it, though.
I find the attitude of the OSS community depressing about this subject. They are too close to the technology and can't see the flaws in it.
Once upon a time, there were these things called "newsgroups"...
Wikis (or if your group is HTML literate, just setting up a local website on space everyone can access) are fine for producing documents, but are lousy at capturing threaded discussions over time. Setting up a local NNTP server works well for this.
Notes, of course, is a bloated proprietary monster that should have been killed long ago.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Twice a day delivery is an awful idea. First, email is asyncronous communication - thus it works better than a phone when I don't want to be interrupted. I can read it and answer it when I want, not when the company schedules me to. Second, why impose structure on a system that has its advantages in allowing for less structure? If there actually is anything important everyone has to wait to get it started becuase they won't know about it until 8 hours later (ie. what if there is an internal post that has an error?) Companies want responsive employees, not people that take 7 hour coffee breaks before they panic on what needs to get done. Like most other posts - the problem is not inherant to email, but found either the idiots that can't figure out to use it (your boss!), or the people that over use it (spammers). My email works great. I love it, don't know what I would do without it.
The system should be designed so that emails can never be silently lost.
/dev/null. Once /dev/null reads the contents of the e-mail, it is read as far as the software is concerned. You'll think I read the e-mail while I'm blissfully unaware that you ever sent it. Redesign e-mail all you want, but it's impossible to guarantee that any form of computer information exchange happens successfully when you aren't in control of the receiving end.
Care to share exactly how you would ensure that is true? It can't be solved at the protocol level, the receiving end could make a mistake, or simply lie.
What if the admin accidently pointed my mailbox to
Yes it's annoying having to guess if your e-mail made it or not, but this problem can only truly be solved socially.