Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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