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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."
Wait a few minutes
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
My work here is dung.
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
In development over the last 5 years I think the most useful tools are IM (or IRC) and Wiki. Email can be used to setup a time to meet/work on things, from there constant talk back/forth via IM is perfect. Hashing out overall ideas via the Wiki is perfect for before and after, and allows for ones ideas to get fully out there, then edited by others during critque.
This has been true for me working on OSS at night with a partner in Qubec as well as working in the same office with a developer two aisles away.
fak3r.com
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).
1. "If you are using SMTP (the universal pipe, remember?), you need to know that it doesn't encrypt data/messages. If you are using POP or IMAP, you need to know that they both require you to send unencrypted authentication (username/password)."
None of these is true. Encrypted SMTP, POP and IMAP all exist and we've been using encrypted POP/IMAP where I work for over two years now.
2. In the discussion of encrypted e-mail, he jumps straight into certificates with no acknowledgement or apparently even clue that PGP/etc. exist and are a lot simpler to set up and use (even in Outlook, or even manually if you have to).
3. "Eudora Security Flashback: I still don't know what the hell Kerberos is and what it has to do with a dog much less my email?"
Considering that this guy is, judging from the content of his post, very Microsoft-centered, for him to not know what Kerberos is suggests he is not even close to any kind of expertise in the field.
4. "Most companies spend a fortune locking down their IT infrastructure. This results in either Total Lockdown, also known as Paralysis whereby no one can do anything without a password, passkey, keycard, signature and sign-in sheet; or in No Lockdown, also known as Free-Love-Utopia whereby everyone is equal because everyone is an Administrator."
Um... no? He says "This results" as though these alternatives are the only two possible. This is probably just sloppy writing, but it still sticks out at me.
5. "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."
I know from personal experience that Eudora among others had the capability to set and recognize a Priority or read-receipt header as long as 10 years ago. Priority fell out of favor because of abuse by spammers, but it does exist. And that was valid for any message sent to or from anyone on the Internet. Can we trust Outlook's read-receipt and priority flags to be as portable?
6. "Its still challenging for multiple people to share business email accounts (i.e. support, bugs and sales messages). IMAP sort of works, but presents its fair-share of limitations."
Such as? How could IMAP be better? Given the inherent needs and limits of sharing what is essentially a file folder, I think IMAP is designed about as well as it can be. There could be improvements, but nothing I can think of that would make me go "wow! It's a whole different IMAP!"
7. "Email is Prone to Viruses - There is no need to elaborate here."
Yes there is, because (say it with me!) E-MAIL IS NOT PRONE TO VIRUSES. E-MAIL CLIENTS ARE.
There are some good points in this article, but you have to filter them out from the sophistry.
-- Old Man Kensey
CTO = chair throwing officer?