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Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
Gary W. Longsine writes "The Washington Post writes about a Venture Capitalist and blogger, Fred Wilson, who recently declared 'e-mail bankruptcy', wiping out his inbox and starting over because he couldn't keep up. Spam is cited as one reason. There have been several public incidents, some cited in the article, where the flow of email is just too much to keep up. 'If there is a downside to completely turning a back on e-mail, it's not one many former users notice. Stanford computer science professor Donald E. Knuth started using e-mail in 1975 and stopped using it 15 years later. Knuth said he prefers to concentrate on writing books rather than be distracted by the steady stream of communication.' Is email just too hectic a communication form for some people? Is email dead?"
but when I figure it out, I'll shoot you an email.
No, sexually bankrupt actually.
Email is dead, Netcraft confirms it.
The television will not be revolutionized.
Judging by the millions of people who use email every second, I think it's safe to place bets on email being dead.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Dead as the millions of blackberrys on the market...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
The joy of email is you don't have to answer it right away. If the email you are getting is keeping you from doing real work, then it's because you being to OC over checking and replying and researching every email that comes your way every 15 minutes. Stop checking it so often and learn to prioritize and it's no longer a distraction.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
"Is email dead?"
No.
Yes. Email, computers and cell phones are all dead....
Yet again, I will shake my head that the editors turned down my ww2 tank find story (you know, where these guys in russia go out with metal detectors and find submerged german and russian tanks around kursk -- I think it was -- and restore them)....
Gah!
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I've seen a related phenomenon at least a half-dozen times over the last couple of years. I work in a large organization where lots of people live and die by their email. Lots of computers also means a steady stream of drive failures. Despite all the warnings and training, some people will have no backups. Their entire careers, it seems, are in the contents of the Personal Folders they've created in Outlook and when I tell them it's all irrecoverably gone, they have a panic attack or something close to it.
Then, two days later, I run into them and they invariably tell me the same thing. They say that the loss of all that stored email was liberating. They feel free to work in the current moment instead of following up on old items that nobody *really* cared about anyway.
They were able to concentrate on what was important to their peers and bosses. Why? Because they told those people "All my email is gone; please re-send to me anything important" and found that what they got back was far less than they had been trying to keep track of previously.
I thought this was all very odd until I remembered how I lost my old ccMail files when we transitioned to Exchange so many years ago. I remember the feeling of having dropped the dead weight I'd been carrying for so long.
My point is that, no, email isn't dead. It is, however, an oppressive presence in the life of many people. Throwing it off and starting over, maybe greatly de-emphasizing its role, is not necessarily a bad thing.
Like many things in life some individuals can't cope. Being deluged by spam is a lame excuse - I use GMail - I sign up to all sorts of dubious services with it& have receievd 1 piece of spam so far.
At any time I've over 3 other email addresses, the key rule with them is to check them daily else I'll... get a backlog.
People whinging about email tell more about themselves than email.
Seems some people have trouble saying 'no'. I have e-mail coming in, requesting me to do things, to think something through, to agree on something, god knows what.
So I say "no." No, I don't have time to think about it. No, I don't have to read this. No, I am not the one to agree with you on this.
I always reply, though, but sometimes just a polite "no". If you don't reply, that's when people start calling. What's next, declaring that the telephone is bankrupt?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
It is ridiculous to even suggest that email is dead. Whether or not it is a dying technology I can not say, but I use email both at work and for personal use extensively. I would not be able to do so if I was the only one.
and like any tool one needs to know how to use it properly.
Spam has never wasted a second of my time. Anything that makes it through my filter is ignored. I don't even bother to delete it.
If somebody starts sending me bloated useless emails, I just start innoring them.
I just think the problem is that some people who use email do not understand that you just have to ignore junk mail that comes. Just like with snail mail, it goes directly in the recycle bin. Do not bother reading it to make sure it is junk. You know it is junk. Ignore it. People just do not understand this. Junk also may include mail from people you know, friends, just ignore it. don't worry, be happy.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
At my place of business, it seems the biggest hurdle people have with keeping up with email is organization. This is really noticeable with the older Civil Engineers in my office that didn't start out using email. I know one that just lets his inbox fill up until it gets near 1000 then has our IT manager archive it (the IT manager has tried explaining how to create new personal folders in Outlook, but it is a lost cause).
I know you need to save email for CYA situations, but what good does it do if you can't find the email you need?
"Oh, say, can you see by the dawnzer lee light," sang Miss Binney
Advanced filtering and tagging makes it easy to prioritize your email. If you don't have time to read your low priority email, then simply don't read it. There's no law saying you have to read every email you receive. It's stupid to turn your back on all your email just because you can't read some of it.
I find it hard to believe that if you filter out spam, news digests, etc. and are down to personal communications, that you are honestly getting too many unless you're the president. If you are getting that many and you're not being paid enough to hire help, you should seriously reconsider why it is you're getting that many emails. Those add up to a sizeable population and should probably equate to some kind of increase in responsibility, and ergo an increase in pay significant enough to employ an assistant.
stuff |
Crow T. Trollbot
It's strange. The email server that I control has pretty good spam filtering. Maybe one spam a month has been delivered to my inbox over the last year or so [with no false positives yet]. Ever since I implemented the current filtering I've started feeling like I hardly get any email at all. Other than a couple low-volume lists to which I'm subscribed, the only time I get email is when when my sister wants to ask me a question.
It turns out, most of the people I regularly communicate with online just use AIM/MSN/Jabber. This actually makes me a bit sad as I prefer email.
Maybe I should just stop using IM and force my friends to use email.
Nothing to see here
Honestly, if i call someone a real friend i usually just phone or text them. So is e-mail dead? I say no. It's handy, but hardly the thing it might have been years ago.
You constantly struggle for self improvement - and it shows.
Hooray for bad Engrish on fortune cookies
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I know having 2,500 emails unread would cause me stress. It used to. Here is how I learned to cope:
* POPFile to weed out the overwhelming majority of the spam. If you've got 4 spams to 1 legit email life seems pretty freaking unimaginably difficult, and nowadays my server inboxes are closer to 100 to 1. My actual client inbox is about 1 to 100 thanks to POPFile.
* Automatically filter automated emails (trade confirmations, bank statements, EBay whatever, anything without a human on the line) to a "I will probably never need this but just in case" folder. This generally requires setting up one rule in your client per business you do business with, or if you're like me you double up on the POPFile goodness and tag them all "auto" then just move based on that tag.
* Check email twice per day, moving every email out of the inbox after it is dealt with. Anything left in your inbox should be a pressing work matter -- if not, move it out, its done. In between my scheduled email checks I only fire it up if I'm looking to make some work for myself. If someone thinks they need a response immediately and I care that they think they need a response immediately, then they have my phone number.
* Get on with life.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I could see a blogger getting a lot of e-mail, doesn't that go with the territory. Especially a venture capitalst blogger, won't you get a lot of emails asking for money?
My spam filter works at removing the vast majority of my spam, but I only get 150-200 spam per day.
Email works for me because it doesn't force me to stop what I'm doing and pick up a phone. And you can send photos, documents, etc...
Email is far from dead for the average person.
Since I've started using Gmail spam has been mostly a non-issue. Their spam filter is INCREDIBLY good, I maybe receive unfiltered spam a couple of times a month or so. I've pretty much given up on "heavy client" email apps, such as Thunderbird which I used before then. Now if they provided IMAP access to Gmail and mobile push access like Windows Live it would be perfect.
If you're getting hundreds or thousands of spam emails every day in your inbox, then you clearly should find some other means of communication as it would seem that email is too tricky and complicated for you.
However, the rest of us who know enough to keep decent spam filters turned on and updated and have mastered the "secret art" of having several dummy email accounts to enter into various online forms (which will in turn get loaded with spam) will keep using this "bankrupt" communication tool. I get MAYBE 2 - 3 spam emails that get by my filters in a day. I get NONE at my work email (and yes, I send a fair amount of email). I just think it's a cop out for laziness when people claim to be drowning in spam. They've obviously made errors in judgement in the past and have "compromised" their email address. It may be time for a new address which should be protected and provided only to those who need it, but to forsake the entire medium is ridiculous.
Email beats the shit out of IM. At least you can ignore email for a little while.
Not so with IM. When that frakking window pops up and starts flashing, it is almost impossible to ignore. I don't even have ANY IM software installed at home, but at work it is mandatory.
I HATE IM!!!
Same thing happens with mobile numbers... too many stalker girls get a hold of it, and before you know it, you don't want to read your texts/listen to your answerphone. So you change your number and let people who you want to contact you have the new one. Simple. Works fine with mobiles. If someone really urgently needs to get hold of you, they will be able to. The same works for email addresses. Stop getting so attached to numbers/email addresses. They are only tools to facilitate contact.
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
Uh no. If anything, the way some people handle email may be outdated, but that's about the most that can be said about it. Personally, I tell everyone to email me if they have something for me. Then, when I'm between projects or otherwise not occupied ( ie: slacking off ), I'll go through my inbox and pop things to do on the ol' corkboard. Low tech, sure, but it works. Then, I'll simply go through the cork board by priority and be done with it.
Some people want to spaz out over every bit of communication they receive, but once you learn to prioritize it the problem goes away.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Email isn't dead. Spam did kill my first email address after I had it for seven years. When I got my own domain, I created a general purpose email address and a email address for all the email lists I subscribe to. That and my ISP's anti-spam efforts has cut down on the amount of spam I get. Email is manageable if you get it organized first. Having 2,000+ emails sitting in your inbox is plain nuts.
of course email is still useful, and it always will be
people like Fred Wilson and Donald E. Knuth i think are really just covering for a desire to be less social. which is not a bad instinct if you want to write a book or get some real work done, and to have a good cover story like "my email inbox is chock full, i can't deal with it" is a nice way to brush certain people off who otherwise might get offended
i have 2 email addresses. 1 everyone knows about, and it is usually barely looked at, full of crap that got in my inbox because i needed an email address to sign up for some site, sort-of friends and their useless and retarded forwarded email jokes, recruiters pumping job offers, etc. i'd say i read 1 out of every 25 emails for that address, and barely scan the headlines for the rest
the other address is piped to my blackberry and is paid attention too, as the only people who get it are family, close friends, work, etc
i think that's a good bifurcation to live with: a public email address and a private one. and it's an easy and obvious management idea. anyone could have figured it out
so to play this lame game of skewering email itself is just a cover story for a deeper desire to get away from the constant chatter of life. again, not a bad instinct, but it reveals that "oh noes! email is dead!" is not the real story here, never was, and never will be, even though you will always hear the refrain, time and time again, whenever someone wants to unplug and tell a white lie in order to do that without offending
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yeah, right, it's dead. What is this crap? So a handful of people have decided not to use e-mail. Allow me to point out that the other 99.9% of people who have it, are using it.
I use snail mail sparingly. In my mind, it's certainly deader than e-mail, but neither is "dead." What a stupid statement to make or question to ask. E-mail isn't going to disappear. God, we can only hope that it improves and, granted, it hasn't improved much. Some sort of certification system to put an end to spam and other unwanted e-mail will be a welcome upgrade, but it's far from dead without it. Spam filters do wonders. Despite a dozen or so spam e-mails a day (my provider does pretty good filtering), with my own spam filtering, maybe 1 a week gets through to where I actually have to look at it.
I couldn't do my job, as I do it, without e-mail. I work from home and have for many years. E-mail and IM are my lifelines to my co-workers. Email is more used today than it was just a year ago and continues to be used more and more every day. I don't see that changing any time soon.
Spam is one thing, piles of legitimate e-mail is another. Some people have hundreds of issues a day, and if e-mail is abandoned, some other form of communication will take its place. The busiest people with large amounts of work-related e-mail have a secretary to filter and re-direct messages.
I actually have to agree with this talk about bancruptcy. Honestly, email has gotten to the point where I can't keep up with it either. I'm a software developer, and I get so many emails at work that it can take me at least a couple hours in the morning just to read them all. When you only have an 8 hour workday, and two hours of it is spent emailing, that's clearly bad for the company. I delete 50% of them at least without even looking at more than the subject and senders name, because if it appears to be just another one of those FYI emails, I'm sure not wasting my time. Also, I know that email is not used for really critical communication. I know I can just delete the email, because if it is something really urgent, someone will call me about it.
Two other thoughts:
One last thought: If you work in an office and use a modern email system like outlook, email rules/filters are your BEST FRIEND. I went from getting hundreds of emails a day to about 10 now due to how heavilly I filter things (and I'm not talking about spam; that's already removed by corporate spam filters and I never see any). I've essientially built such a wall around my inbox that only the high priority stuff gets through. And you know what? I've never once had anyone complain about me dodging email. Why no complaints, even though I really do ignore most people's emails? Because most email literally is so unimportant and trivial (and mass-mailed to so many people anyway), that ignoring it doesn't effect ANYTHING .
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Experts say the best way to deal with it is to set aside one or two times a day to sift through and answer e-mail, instead of dealing with it the moment is comes in. Treat it like any other correspondence or paying bills- if you have a large pile of either, you usually set it aside until you can deal with the pile in one go.
they need to ask themselves if they're talking about something that hundreds of millions of people still use daily. Some douchebag realizes that mail sucks in an unfiltered state if you get a lot of it daily, and all of a sudden it's dead? You know whats dead to me? Spending five minutes yping inanely abbreviated messages into inscrutable screens using my thumbs like some kind of proud monkey just to get a simple fucking sentence across. Email forever, fuck text messaging.
yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss sssssssssssssss. you've got the point
?
"Nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded."
I want a beowulf cluster of G5 servers sending mail to themselves!
Why do we have to consider things as 'dead'? Email has uses, so does parcel mail, as does anything else in the world. I could go on for hours saying different things are dead, but it doesn't change that everyone still uses it. e.g.: Math, books, paper, cds are dead! (cds might actually be true soon)
are digital slave collars. Like cell phones and pagers.
A couple of weeks ago, I was at dinner with a co-worker and a couple of his friends. One of his friends is a first-year attorney at a big law firm. He got demanding messages from work about every 10 minutes during dinner. I could see the stress on his face when he got the messages. That Blackberry surely did not improve the quality of his life.
And most of the global e-mail is pushing Viagra or pumping penny stocks. The 3rd large category is someone sending a picture or link to a picture of a cute kid or cat to everyone in their address book and someone else responding to everyone in the address list. So, 99% of it is trash, just like all other areas of human endeavor.
URL?
:)
Who needs editors anyway?
Spam is the problem.
If you want the option to be very aggressive about spam control, TMDA (Tagged Message Delivery Agent) is a challenge based tool that requires a sender to confirm their sending address before the incoming message is delivered.
So maybe TMDA is the answer.
People complain about getting too much spam, yet they freely enter their e-mail on web forms, join discussion lists, or give their e-mail address to a bookstore for a chance at an ipod. Guard that e-mail address with your life. If you need one to signup for freebies, get a yahoo or gmail account and use it only for that. Also use javascript to write your e-mail on your web pages. They can't spam you if they don't know who you are. Only give your e-mail to folks who want to contact you. If it still gets overloaded, then start a new one, and only give it to people you like.
I get hundreds of thousands of spam messages per year yet only a handful reach my inbox. Although somewhat slow, Spamassassin is damn near perfect for filtering out spam and passing the ham. Way better than the Thunderbird spam stuff and better than GMail even (which is pretty good itself).
Email is the largest and most critical app for businesses today. It requires administration, and it requires diligence on the part of email services provides-- who uniformly don't care if their systems are abused. It costs money, and no one wants to spend money. Yet no other app has done a better job of propelling the Internet, and business-to-business communications, as well as people-people communications. Yes, IM is great; so is texting, but email is the best because it's rich media.
It's kind of like spending money for a car, then find out you have to change the oil, the timing belt, rotate tires, and so on. Those whose inboxes are constantly full are idiots not to use intelligent spam filters, keep their email addresses from being harvested by bots, and other common-sense use policies.
Every once in a while, it's just fine to get away from your email app and breathe. Voicemail was invented to allow people to control their phone time, and there are numerous ways to prevent email overload. As a friend of mine once said, we're the humans-- they're the computers-- we're in control.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I handling messaging at a very large ISP. If people treated their e-mail address more like a phone number and only gave it out to persons from which they wanted to receive e-mail, people would receive alot less e-mail.
., "john.smith23" and they will eventually find you with "weak" usernames.
Here are some recommendations for people getting hit heavily by spam.
1. Create a primary e-mail address and secondary disposable e-mail address or alias for public communication.
If you have to communicate an e-mail address publicly on a questionable website or newsgroup, create a disposable alias for the purpose. If that disposable address begins to receive large amounts of spam, create a new disposable address and discard the old one.
2. Use your aliases with family members you expect will sign you up for Internet greeting cards and such that are likely to land you on spammer mailing lists.
Mom will most certainly have no problem helping your alias "subscribe" to many a spammer's list.
3. Avoid easily guessable e-mail addresses that are likely to be found by harvesting, a form of account guessing. For example, avoid john.smith23.
Spammers will harvest accounts by trying deliveries to "john.smith1", "john.smith2" . .
4. If you use a username in an e-mail address at one ISP and that address is getting spammed, avoid using that same username in an address at a second ISP.
Spammers will often test the same addresses they know about across ISPs while trying to harvest addresses. So, for example, if you used an address like mrvick@aol.com that was receiving spam and you signed up for a new account with another large mail provider like Hotmail, avoid using mrvick@hotmail.com.
5. Do not use your work e-mail address for access to sites that may share your address.
I use the above recommendations with my accounts and stay pretty close to spam free even on my alias e-mail accounts.
My "sent items" has 26,272 emails in it. My inbox only has 9,876 emails (7 unread, 59 flagged for follow up.) I'm not sure how many other folders of filed emails I have, or how many emails are in them, but I do know that I automatically back up the entire thing every night while I sleep, and the back up file is 6.1 GB. This system is great. So many things I am not forced to remember, My email is like a supplemental digital memory for my brain, that is searchable by keyword, sent to, received from, and date. I owe a lot of this to "Spamfire", my stand alone spam filter tat catches about 500 spam a day, and only lets in 10 or so spam a day, while almost never stopping a false positive. (I wish it could tell the difference from a legitimate Pay Pal email and a fishing attempt.) My subject title "Never throw anything away" is a bit overstated, but then again, I only empty the trash in the email a few times a year, so for a long time the things I have thrown away are still available and searchable.
San Francisco Photographers
Email Bankruptcy.... Does this mean that if I can't keep up with my spam, I can file for Chapter 11?
u-bend
You're probably looking for the word "obsolete".
Email might be dead, but I'm going to keep using it until Netcraft confirms it.
slashdot bankruptcy.
if you've posted a story, you might want to post it again.
i am starting over.
Long comment above translated: Ooops I just deleted the entire mail server database, sorry.
All kidding aside I agree with you. I have "started over" email wise a couple of times mostly due to my own "Umm did I forget to back those up before I reformatted??" moments. It can be quite liberating.
But I found that instant messenger programs are WAY more intrusive and to me I concider IM's dead.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
But don't I remember a time when technology was suppose to free us instead of turning us in to slaves?
If I was deep this is would be profound, if smart then wise, if a poet then verse. Here it is, you judge!
The good thing about email is that it is cheap. Other than having an Internet connection, email is free (from most places). This is much cheaper and faster than spending 41 cents on stamps and mailing snail mail.
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
Actually I do work in big organisations & yes I get quite a lot of "cc" mail. I reckon on bad days I get over 50 mails addressed to me as cc. First off: if I am cc I lightly skim mail, mostly I don't respond. Secondly: if someone cc's me on a very detailed mail (> 200 words), that wasn't discussed in advance with me: then they are making a mistake.
Same as everything else: I don't go to all meetings I'm invited to ( I pick the ones I need/want to go to). It's a simple matter of managing your productivity.
The only time I've ever been overwhelmed by mail was when I accidentally left my own email address in a "reply to" field of a bespoke error handling system. It mailed 6,000 people within the first 3 hours before I figured out what happened. My mistake.
Personally, I think the stress that many people feel regarding email has much more to do with the psychology behind the reszponse to the technology rather than the technology itself.
s -data-right-effing now. The line between work, friends, and personal time has not only become blurred, its often simply gone.
When I was in college in the late 80's, my girlfriend and I used snail mail to communicate. Its easy, you write a letter, stick it in an envelope, put a stamp, send. When you receive one, there is minimal pressure to respond right away, and you only have a very limited number of things to respond to, besides.
But the networked world, in which I include all communication technolgies (email, phones, cell phones, internet, etc.) have somehow gone from being occasional interruptions to constant ones. They have, even more importantly, gone from ones that require a delayed response to one that we somehow feel compelled to deal with right now, this very minutes, oh-my-god-I-have-to-work-overtime-because-my boss-emailed-my-blackberry-and-he-needs-this-sale
I think that we've undergone a psychological shift due to these influences that we're starting to feel compelled to respond now, to everything. Its a creep that is having a profound effect. I've actually had a boss (and owner of the company) who turned to me one day and said, "I'm always impressed at how you manage to separate your work and personal life," when I told her I had to leave to go coach one of my kids games.
I also think that there are lots of people who simply don't think about what they should be doing. Occasionally my HR department will send out HR updates (new insurance changes, vacation info, paydates that have been randonly moved) and I cannot believe how many idiots in my company respond to @Company revealing their health issues, personal problems, payrates and hours worked, etc. My wife, who is a VP with a team of 10 people, constantly complains that people copy her on *EVERYTHING*. She ends up deleting half her email straight out, and still has to go through most of it to figure out *WHY* she was copied in the first place.
However, using facts that I've pulled from my butt, I'd have to say that this isn't a technology problem. Its an issue of psychology and expectations and human nature. I've found it can generally be solved by decent etiquette and applying a weensy bit of brainpower, but I've also come to realize that most people are capable of neither of those.
Bill
I now get more email that remains unread even to the date of its automated deletion 30 days later in my gmail spam file. Rarely do I even view a day or two to see if a valid communication was mislabeled. I tend to trust the gmail flaggings. Now my Comcast account is a different matter where obvious scams purporting to be from Comcast are neither labeled as such or pursued for their criminal intent. The canned Comcast reasoning is that they originate outside the Comcast email system, they are of no concern. Interesting but dubious logic. Thus, I do view some of the real spam that I have to manually label as such. However, about 40% is recognized properly as spam. My other problem with email I receive in this account is that a periodically valid messages are labeled improperly as spam. These latter incidents are associated with a mail list where the initial question is in the spam and the response is in the regular email. That leaves me perplexed.
In summary, I still find email of use, however, the associated trash lessens its overall value. Nonetheless, at this time, I cannot conceive of my dropping email entirely.
amen to this comment...in fact, its almost a new trend these days. I have lately been telling colleagues to just reformat their hard drives (minus a few key files, of course) and start fresh with xp/ubuntu/fedora/etc. They look at me like I am crazy but EVERY SINGLE ONE of them that took my advice has come back and thanked me for the advice...they feel a huge sense of relief that there computers are no longer loaded with worthless junk that SEEMED important.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Obviously it's dead. Only old people in Korea use it.
<sarcasm>Yes, of course email is dead.</sarcasm>
Some people have a hard time dealing with distractions, some people have a hard time prioritizing, so let's blame it on the medium. These are probably the same people who had huge piles of paper and couldn't keep up with the deluge of paper mail and memos twenty years ago.
Other people, myself included, love email. I telecommute full time (from across the country) and could not do my job without email. I have almost all of my email about back around twelve years, and some sporadic stuff going back further. And I find it very useful to be able to go back to it when I need to find an old address, figure out when something happened, etc. If other people have a hard time dealing with a new medium, it's their problem, not email's problem.
And I'm not one of the slashdot is going to hell crowd, since the quality of posts and comments doesn't seem to have changed much since I started reading in (ack: 9 years ago!). But can we please keep the trolling in the comments where it belongs?
-Esme
You comment made me think back to an interview I heard a few days back on the CBC (Canadian radio) asking about whether computer should forget. I know it is great we have all this information at our fingers tips but at what point is it too much being able to sort though and make sense is a skill not many people have and begging able to ignore all the junk and think that are not importer even fewer people have.
p 3
With the shear amount of information being created and none of it going away EVER these days were becoming pack rats to the point where we even box up all our own feces and file it away for later examination. In the real world we would clean this up and throw it out every so often. So it is no surprise to me that when someone's slate is wiped clean (and all there shit is tossed out) in the computer world they feel so good after their initial shock of the loss. Most things that are critically important are backed up or have been passed around with other people who you are working on it with.
Any who if you would like to listen to it:
15/05/2007: Internet Memory - Technology that doesn't Forget
http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/current_20070515_2306.m
People need to read the book Getthing Things Done by David Allen.
No sig for now.
...now he's "bandwidth bankrupt" too. At least for his blog site.
FLR
I know of several men who used to use toilets decades ago, and 15 years ago they stopped (thank you Depends!).
I guess toilets are dead.
I have a few email accounts that I use when registering myself with online businesses. Some of them get a lot of spam, but it doesn't matter because I only look at them maybe once a year and am only interested in very recent emails anyway.
I have another email address for personal communication. I only give it out to people directly, and I instruct them to not type it in to web forms that say "send this to a friend!" Once in a while they do anyway, and I nag them about it. It usually lasts a good three or four years before it starts getting spam, at which point I just create a new one and tell all my friends/relatives to start using the new one instead...and just delete the old one.
Works great.
I run everything inbound through a spam filter first. Anything flagged as spam gets ignored until the end of the day, then I make a quick pass through to see if anything jumps out at me as valid and delete everything else. The stuff that makes it into my inbox I ask three questions about:
- Do I need to remember this for the future?
- Do I need to respond to this?
- Do I need to respond to this now?
If the answer to #3 is yes, I respond and file the message. If the answer to #2 is yes, I flag it for follow-up. At the end of the day I recheck all the flagged messages and if I still need to respond I do. If the answer to #1 is yes, I file the message in the appropriate folder and flag it based on how long I figure I need to remember it. If the answer to all three is no, I delete the message. Once a month I make a pass through my folders and delete messages I don't need or want to keep any longer.80% or more of my mail gets deleted within 48 hours of arriving (or, at work, filed in the "preserve the evidence for the upcoming court-martial" folder).
I think that watching the statistics, it's safe to say that e-mail is not dead.
However, this is a question orthogonal to "Should you use it?" I understand that some people get luckier with spam than others, but from what I've seen it can become too much to handle even with filtering. Even if you're low on spam, e-mail attracts useless mails from colleagues etc. at a rate that some simply can't cope with or don't want to deal with. And then there's the issue of privacy - all your mails are read by other people than just the addressee.* Sure there's GnuPG, which would solve the privacy issue and could largely solve the spam issue, if you don't care for mail from strangers for example, but in practice it turns out to be impossible to get people to use it.**
Is e-mail dead? Obviously not. It's morally dead, but that's not the same thing. Perhaps in that sense e-mail is like religion.
*When talking about security, "it may be happening" = "it happens".
**I'm not sure why not. From reactions I've got it's not installation or usabilty problems, since people apparently don't even try. When you explain the benefits people say "you're right" but then they don't act on it. Perhaps subconsciously they're afraid it would force them to question some beliefs about their privacy and safety that they would rather not learn the answer to. And perhaps they have got a point, after all there's a big difference between being told by a random nerd that e-mail is not safe and realizing it. Anyway, I'm back to old fashioned postal mail.
Poor me! I have too much email that I have to read! Boo hoo hoo, I can't figure out how to subscribe to a service that provides respectable spam filtering! I'm incapable of not responding to every single email that comes in within 10 minutes! Waaaaa! It's not my fault I have no time management skills, it's because of EMAIL! Won't someone please protect me?!?!
Nonsense! Don't know about you, but an incoming email message doesn't distract me at all. As a matter of fact --- oh wait, I'll just check this one message... Now what was I saying?
Seems you've identified another undocumented feature of a key microsoft product.
Well done!
My shock isn't with the imminent demise of email. But with the hard-hitting journalism of the "liberal" Washington Post.
it's information overload in general
too many emails to process in too many email addresses (god- I have 5 or 6?)
too many posts on too many message boards to read and process (active on 7 to 10 forums)
too many television shows to keep up with (with resulting societal fragmentation-- no "water cooler" shows to bond with)
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Apparently, Fred doesn't know that this has been an issue for years. It's only now that he's gotten tired of it and decided to vent his frustrations this way. This is a typical overreaction from someone who does not understand the nature of the problem.
No doubt he's one of those people who feels that he can't afford to filter his mail properly. God forbid that an important message from his mother may one day end up among the false positives! On the other hand, he's just as likely to be among the legions who daily send email messages from badly configured mail clients and servers -- the very thing that makes it possible for spam to look like ham.
The truth is that it doesn't matter what kind of messaging system we use: as long as it's decentralized, we will all have to configure our servers properly, or else we'll all end up with exactly the same problems again. The alternative would be to use a centralized authentication mechanism instead, but then the question would be: who would we trust with that? Microsoft? VeriSign? Yuk! I think everyone will agree (even Fred) that it's always better to have a decentralized system. In which case email (SMTP) is fine, but just needs to be configured properly.
Actually, even if Fred's mail server is properly configured (for sending mail), it's people like him who are actually to blame for keeping things such as mess. Yes, Fred is his own worst enemy. How so? Because his system keeps accepting all the crap along with the good stuff. Look at it this way: if everybody decided today to configure their mail servers properly, always filtering out and rejecting anything that looks fishy, that would force everybody else to configure their mail servers properly as well. In that case, the spammers would no longer have any place to hide, in which case we'd all be able to choose whether we accept their mail or not. End of problem.
I only back up my MP3 (all ripped from albums that I own, thank you) and my digital photos.
Everything else I have is:
- downloaded from the net (so I can get it back)
- so dated that it no longer matters (whereas the personal value of photos goes up as they age....)
- stored under svn on a remote server that is backed up nightly
I use Acronis to image my drives while they are clean, and on occasion I like to re-image the hard drive, apply all the updates, and start over.
It really is refreshing.
There's a fix for email, which is scrapping the current infrastructure completely and setting up an incompatible system with whatever security/authentication is required to keep the signal to noise higher.
It has to be backwards incompatible so it doesn't just bring along all the spam problems, and to do that enough people have to say "I'm done with email and will no longer have an email address, I'm using this instead if you want to "email" me you'll have to too".
Just like all such things a critical number has to be reached for it to happen...
Keep in mind that people use email for quite a bit more than just exchanging messages with each other. For instance: I work with a company that has an inbox set up that grabs any properly formatted Excel sheets that come in, pushes them through a database, then replies a result (I work in an auto auction, the customer will put all of his purchases into the excel spreadsheet, send it off, and the bot replies to him where to send all of the cars). Some people might argue that this is something better suited for FTP, or maybe some CGI on a webserver...but email works PERFECTLY for this application. EVERYONE has email, and it works almost 100% of the time. In fact, just about every non computer-literate person i know uses their email like an FTP. If they want to share a file with somebody, they email it. If they want to have something available to them where ever they go (as long as they have a net connection) they email it to themselves. Google even has the ability to play MP3s directly from your inbox. This makes sense though, what is easier? FInding an FTP server for your windows box, creating a rule on your firewall, and then remembering your IP address, or setting up some DNS action (even more fun when you have a dynamic address, don't know what a NAT/FIREWALL is, have no idea what an IP address is, and have never heard of FTP), or just sending a simple email?
So...maybe to the old school UNIX admin who uses MUTT as their mail client.....email might be dead, but in the big time business world, it is very very much alive.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
I prefer it when people send me an email at work than coming over to my cube and interrupting me. Plus the email is going to be far more precise, which is important since at work 90% of the time I'm talking about C. It's kind of hard to express C accurately in a verbal way. If it turns out there needs to be more 2-way interaction, then I'll go to their cube as a response to their email so we can draw on a whiteboard or whatever.
of course I don't get 100s of emails a day like a professor might. But if you're a professor I don't see why assistants can't go through your inbox. Just have a special public email for your students to use.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The vast majority of people I encounter who complain about "email overload" are the ones still receiving everything into one huge "Inbox" folder initially. Then in most cases, they're manually sorting things out as they read them, placing them in manually created sub-folders.
..." rule. If you regularly do online purchasing with certain vendors, you can automatically dump their emails into a "Web order related" folder, for example.
If they'd take a couple hours out of their busy day, just once, to create some sensible automatic filtering rules in their email client, I suspect it would pay off for most of them pretty quickly.
The truth is, most people receive regular emails from specific addresses, so these could be sorted just by a basic "if mail is from xxx@yyy.com, then
If e-mail is this disruptive, then what about IM?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
How can you even ask that? 'Is it dieing?' would at least indicate that you are not completely out of touch with reality.
...
But seriously: yeah, email can get harsh. But as always the question is not about ideals it's about which solution sucks less (or least). And I think, for myself, the answer is pretty clear: email is much preferable to calls, face to face or books (wth?). It's asynchronos so you can prepare your answers. It's lightweight so you may save them as long as you like. It's not very reliable which is a plus in any environment where tasks will inevitable be forgotten. When the shit hits the fan it's always possible to say 'oh well, I just didn't get that mail'. Allows everyone to save face. It's so fast it's almost real-time when it needs to be. Oh yeah: you can always do a text search on your email folder. Not that easy with call-sheets
My advice:
* use at least three mail addresses: private, internal business, external business
* filter, filter filter (3 stage spam filter works the best, I think)
* organize your inbox along the lines: who sent it? which topic/project does it concern? Is it addressed to me (your name should be in the text or alone in the 'To' field), addressed to a distribution list I'm on or am I just on CC or BCC?
Outlook can automatically organize your inbox like that if you know how to use email rules and virtual folders.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
Ah, give that man a banana. This is something I've started to recognise myself in recent years. Since forever I've hoarded stuff 'just in case'. Everytime I move house I drag along hundreds of VHS tapes, piles of CDs, mementos and other junk. My PC has old programs, emails, data files etc. often dating back 20+ years and most I never, ever look at. I kept telling myself it would be good to keep, maybe I'm the only person who kept a copy of that obscure documentary from 1985? That email would be fun from 1990 and so on.
Then my wife got medieval on me and made me throw out 99% of the tapes and started a rule that any CD that didn't get listened to for say a year got ebay'd or sent to the charity shop. And the data and emails? I pulled out the hard drives on the shelf, checked for anything *really* important (the resulting zip file from 7 hard drives was less than 100k), wiped them (properly, before anyone starts to warn me about that) and sold them. At each stage it felt like having a huge weight lifted from my soul.
The long and the short is, I now periodically just blitz my emails and if anything is that important, they'll come back to me. Now I have considerably less stress worrying about all the oustanding jobs I'm supposed to be doing.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
37% of email users said spam had increased in their personal email accounts, up from 28% of email users who said that two years ago. And 29% of work email users said spam had increased in their work email accounts, up from 21% two years ago. Yet fewer people say spam is "a big problem" for them.
c.f. (report PDF, phone survey about spam that was conducted between February 15 and March 7, 2007)
Now does this tell us something about e-mail or about recipients?
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I can deal with a hundred or so email messages. I can scroll through and skim the subject lines in a few seconds.
But I just hate it when I see that my phone's "voice mail" indicator is flashing. There aren't any subject lines. Even though most of it isn't important, there's no way to be sure.
So, there's no rational strategy once you see the light is flashing except to sit there for five minutes, listening to the damn messages in real time.
I can hope that at least some of them will give you an idea of what they're about in the first few seconds, but for every person who thinks that "Hi" is a good subject line, there is someone who thinks "Please call me" is a good voice mail message. So if that isn't someone you can ignore, I need to call them and leave them frickin' voice mail message (because in the twenty-first century, the idea of actually being able to reach anyone on the phone is absurd).
And I get to do all of this one a great big 20-column-by-4-line alphanumeric screen. With a legible, ergonomic snot-on-phlegm color scheme. And a badly designed user interface that maps every function into a number... except for a rew random keys with arrows and blobs and non-message-related legends on them. So if Idon't have the plastic card handy, Ineed to wait while an obnoxious synthesized voice says "To listen, press 5; to erase, press 8;...." And hope I don't get confused with the other voice mail systems I use on which I press 8 to listen and 5 to erase, or whatever.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
there is always twitter to replace email, right?
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
It's a little like NNTP/USENET, in that it's raw and insecure and will just fade away.
I was amazed that banks in the US send you things via regular email, this was a shock coming from any country where they do not send personal things via insecure email. It felt like they were sending my statements via postcards in regular mail.
Another system should & will come along that will solve the spam problem, provide privacy & authenticity.
Isn't backupping done centrally in your organization? And why is e-mail stored on peoples desktops?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
The fact that most e-mail is spam and people still use it is a testament to how useful e-mail is.
I've noticed that email works well in some cases. When you need to contact someone about something which is not that important, email is excellent. Also if you want to discuss something important, email is a good media because you can craft your response as long as it takes. The conversation is stored so there's no need to keep separate notes.
... and so on.
s /linden.jsp "We use JIRA for all task-in-progress tracking in the company - everything from ordering food in the kitchen to releasing a new feature to fixing a bug."
Then are those cases when email doesn't work at all, most related to work in some way or the other.
A lot of detail is lost in email. Writing things down is a much slower process and more error prone then describing them in person. There's also the danger of the recipient misunderstanding the message, even to the point where a wrong wording might be understood as an personal insult or challenge.
Email is flooding the inbox. About 20% of the email I get is something that conserns me. Yet I need to constantly filter all the emails in case I miss something important. I'd prefer to read the general announcements from the intranet. No, I'm not interested in mainframe upgrade problems.
Emails get forgotten. "Oh I forgot to send you that email two weeks ago"
Discussions about complex and large issues usually get derailed if there are too many people chipping in. Details are lost in the flood of the messages as people fork their own discussions.
Finding out good ways to reduce the amount of emails isn't easy. It seems that the best principle is to use the right tool for the job.
Bug and issue tracking, tasks and project management work much better when a proper project management software is used. Concentrating on the right tasks is much easier, if you just need to check from the application what you're supposed to be doing. Everything gets assigned to a someone so it's always obvious who should be working on what. This is an interesting piece about how Linden Labs uses a task management software to control their every day tasks -> http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/casestudie
Face to face discussions, meetings (in moderate amount) and pair programming increase the flow of information. Forums work nicely for discussions in a larger group. Wikis are good for sharing information. Somehow I just wish they'd all come as a nicely integrated package which allows the information flow as naturally as possible. (and no, Lotus Notes is not integrated, nice or natural)
That quote was from Yogi Berra.
You should attribute if you "borrow" ideas. Otherwise, it looks like you are trying to make it your own.
Some questions have such obviously false answers that to pose them is to engage in the same inflammatory BS that the corporate news is into these days... namely the practice of asking questions instead of making statements ("Is Hillary Clinton gay?") on the basis that asking makes the asker seem thoughtful and open minded, whereas making statements ("Hillary Clinton is gay!") requires some degree of confidence about the assertion.
As lampooned on The Daily Show (clip now seems gone from youtube). Memorable line: "I'm not SAYING that your mother is a whore. I'm merely wondering out loud IF she is a whore! Reasonable people who have paid your mother for boning them are free to disagree!"- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
E-mail is a tool, just like a hammer. You don't throw away your hammers and start over if you hit your thumb. You also don't use a screwdriver to drive in nails. 1. Learn to use the tools. 2. Use good spam filters to toast unwanted mail and message filters to organize your e-mail. 3. Get some discipline about when to read and reply to e-mail. 4. Let the rest go and practice deep healing breaths. After all, it is only e-mail.
Yup, e-mail is dead. And so is the mainframe computer.
With the proper mail management tools, even heavily-laden inboxes are easily handled. All mailing lists have their own folder. All individuals go to personal. Anything left from their is probably someone I don't know.
*shrug*
Filtering, it is your friend.
Bearded Dragon
That's fine, except for the fact that "silent ringer" has been on cell phones FOR OVER 10 YEARS. The ringer is what pisses people off, not that you are receiving notifications. The fact that you are in a meeting and you couldn't figure out how to make those notifications non-intrusive is what gets me angry. To me, it says you don't care...
I could understand if its been 1-2 years since cell phones first came out but fuck people....find the button already and put your ringer on silent! This isn't rocket science. We aren't launching missles. All we need is you to put your phaser on stun, Jim.
Ok, I think I've made my point. I will be quiet now and go back to my hole.
http://www.mil.hiiumaa.ee/2000_09_14_kurtna_T-34-3 6/
3 6/
http://www.mil.hiiumaa.ee/2000_09_14_kurtna_T-34-
What I find incredible is the condition of the tanks after lying at the bottom of a lake or buried in a bog for 50 years. These things look like they could be started up and driven off.
Not until Netcraft confirms it
The blogger who is the subject of the article means by email bankruptcy that he is removing himself from any obligation to read anything sent in the past, or to reply to anything. It is a notice and an apology to anyone waiting for his attention. He might also think that email is dead, but by email bankruptcy he did not mean "email is dead".
... we need email tax... http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/ 24/1516253
cause it will get email out of bankruptcy or end it once and for all.
Tax email and spammers won't be able to afford the bill and a larger number of users will say screw it and stop using it.
But where will we place the headstone?
Ah, that makes a little more sense then.
I use gmail in much the same way: searching for from:google (I'm being recruited by them) or to:sydney (my wife) in gmail brings up the expected list, sorted by date. (For your clients, you'd just put any email address they use on a contact, and then search for that contact, instead of using a folder.) I've got tags for the mailing lists I'm on (work somewhat like folders, but a message can be in more than one simultaneously), and the archive is already kept forever (I'm using "518 MB (18%) of my 2856 MB", according to the web client).
Sounds like you're running your own (somewhat large) business -- good luck! Hope that the way you handle email works out for you. :)
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
everyday, i have to sort through the junk mail. i have to spend time paying the bills, reading letters, etc.
voicemail is bankrupt, too. i have to listen to the message, write down a number, delete the message, listen to the next.
anything is bankrupt if you A) don't know how to use it or B) don't manage it correctly.
i will, however, concede this: it is essential to use a service like gmail or yahoo that does a very good job of spam filtering. i can count on one hand the number of spam emails that have made it into my gmail inbox. my other (ISP) email addresses went "bankrupt" years ago.
but this is how it is, 2007.
mr c
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
Your standard Bayesian classifier basically says:
Is this mail Junk? yes/no
And that's it. However it can be a bit smarter than that. It's possible to say something like:
Is this mail Junk, Linux, Business or Personal?
However, the accuracy drops rather dramatically, so...
What you need is a classifier which says:
Is this mail Junk? yes/no
Is this mail about Linux? yes/no
Is this mail about Business? yes/no
Is this mail about Personal? yes/no
And then simply tags a mail with all of the results which return yes. You need a separate training corpus for each question but that's easy to do.
So far it hasn't been done, but it's a better solution than your standard email filters.
Deleted
Yeah, Knuth achieved fame in the 70's and is a tenured professor at Stanford. He can afford to turn off E-mail and prefer writing books. He doesn't even have to give a damn about what he publishes anymore.
The rest of us don't have much of a choice but to read E-mail because our livelihood depends on it.
Am I the only one who noticed that the headline doesn't match the summary?
"Is Email 'Bankrupt'?" implies that there is a major problem with e-mail itself, while the summary talks about "blogger, Fred Wilson, who recently declared 'e-mail bankruptcy', wiping out his inbox and starting over because he couldn't keep up." It sounds like Mr. Wilson's e-mail got out of hand. This is like posting the headline "Is money 'bankrupt'?" with an article about someone's poor financial planning causing them to file (financial) bankruptcy.
There are really two separate issues that are getting "smooshed" together into one:
The two questions are certainly related, but they are not the same thing!
Email isn't dead. It just smells funny. ...
So I guess it's no use setting up Courier-IMAP on my BSD box, then?
The problem it seems is that all these people gave everyone the same email address. That's dumb. I have one email address for all my personal emails to friends and family. I never use it for anything else, and get really pissy when people use this email for mass e-mails, etc, just to cut down on it leaking. Despite my efforts I get about 10 spams a day but gmail gets all of them, so it's not an issue.
i have 2 separate email accounts for all financial and business-related stuff, and one for accounts that I buy stuff from, like amazon, etc. 1 email for myspace, etc. The beauty of gmail is that I can forward all the emails into my main email address automatically so I don't need to check them.
I have a separate email for full-disclosure and bugtraq, etc.
If I were these guys like Lessig or the VC dude, all outside correspondence I would funnel to an alternate email address, with an auto-responder saying "Thanks for e-mailing me, I will try my best to answer you when I get a chance!" Then check it every once in a while, and feel free to delete whatever you want because you have no reason to respond if you don't want to.
End of story. What's so hard about that?
When spam took over my inbox and I had the fear that my email was insecure I just discarded that address and just started an other one. Now i pay more attention on where I put my address and who I email, I also have a different address to use when I fear spamming, like when answering ads on craigslist, I think most of the phishing happens when ads are answered. I can pin point the email I send and the first spamming email that comes in. And if the account gets taken over by spam I just replace it, my personal email acct. is only for family and friends. I think one has to have a few email accounts to be safe.
Excellent questions!
Central backup is available but, due to server space constraints, limited to 500mb per user. (This is the single biggest thing I think we could improve about our local infrastructure.) For MOST users, this is fine and dandy. They kick off a backup script icon on their desktop and their email, favorites, and documents folders are automatically synced to their network backup folder.
A substantial minority, however, have far more data. We try to accomodate them with larger network space allowances. Some people, however, fall far enough outside the norm that network backups don't work for them. I know more than one user who stores more than a gig of email per quarter.
Exchange server space is limited, so retained email for most users is kept in *.pst files created by Outlook. Those need to be kept on the local machine because *.pst files get flaky when you access them over a network. In the distant past, when no one dialed in via VPN, everyone was in the office with a rock-solid network connection, and email volumes were lower, it was common for people to keep their Outlook Personal folder (*.pst file) on their network server space. When remote connections became popular and retained email volumes simultaneously started growing more quickly some time ago, the number of corrupted *.pst files skyrocketed and lots of people lost their email. The only solution was to keep retained email on the local machine and try to get everyone to back up regularly.
Microsoft docs on the subject are fairly clear. Personal Folders used to store retained email by Outlook users are NOT intended to be accessed across the network. They should always be local files. We have to work with that as best we can.
Obviously, those lucky users who don't do much email and never keep more than 20-30 megs of the stuff can just leave it all on the Exchange server and never worry about it. For the other 90%+ of our users, that's not an option.
Aside from work (where we are mandated to use email), I stay away from email.
Most of my communications is via forums that I am a member of - most of which have an 'PM' (personal message) capability - which works much like email, but is specific to the members only.
Additionally other mediums, IRC chat, voice (Team Speak, Roger Wilco and the like) fill in for more immediate needs.
Email is not a priority, and the few accounts I still keep, I don't check.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Plus, I've been successfully spam-free for over 4 years.
We do all our helpdesk stuff via e-mail. You send an e-mail to the help address, it creates a ticket and forwards it on to all the staff. Works well since that way we don't have to deal with the whole "Speak to this guy who doesn't know anything to get transferred to another guy to get to the guy who can fix the problem." We just deal with problems in our domain. Another advantage, at least you'd think, is that people would understand the issue goes in the queue and gets deal with as soon as possible.
Well sometimes.
Our grad students in particular are very pushy and seem to have a very poor sense of time. This might be why they tend to wait until the last possible second to do anything. At any rate, on a fairly regular basis we'll get a grad student that sends an e-mail for something and is down in our office asking about it 5-10 minutes later. Really, not exaggerating at all. They send it, don't get an IMMEDIATE response and so come down.
I can buy that some people check their email way too much. But asking if email is dead is just a stupid rhetorical question.
Obviously email is NOT dead.
While there may be other ways of communicating, and while individuals may or may not use email effectively, to ask whether its dead is just ridiculous.
Interesting...I'm just the opposite. I'm a pretty fast reader, and typist...I generally read pretty much all my email and reply when necessary. I've always been pretty adament about deleting things after I read/reply to them. Until last year or two, I thought pretty much everyone did that. I got into a conversation with friends and was amazed how many of them said things like "I've got copies of EVERY email I've ever recieved...for approx. 10+ years!!". I was dumbfounded, especially when to prove it, he pulled up some random emails from me years ago.
Why do people keep all that old stuff? Email to me is pretty much throw away conversations 99% of the time. I guess some people are packrats with physical stuff, others with electronic stuff.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I receive somewhere around 500 e-mails a day, mostly on various technical mailing lists. Currently my spam rate is about 2-3 messages per day. I don't don't take any particular care to hide my e-mail address on the web. The reason my spam rate is so low is largely a technical one. Greylisting currently kills 90% of any spam heading for my e-mail address, right at the server before any spam message is even transmitted.
However, this cannot last forever. Spam has slowly increased after greylisting from none to 2-3 a day, as the spammers zombie hosts start acting more like normal RFC-compliant hosts. Spam stocks make it through after dutifully waiting out the 20 minute delay.
In short it is an arms race. E-mail is getting less and less useful, even with the technological solutions like greylisting, filtering on expressions, etc.
Of course, getting to there from here isn't trivial. But it isn't impossible by any stretch of the imagination.
To quote Stanford algorithms expert Donald Knuth, "Who are you? How did you get in my house?"
This doesn't mean that the basic idea behind email is dead, but you must also think twice about how you use email.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
"If they'd take a couple hours out of their busy day, just once, to create some sensible automatic filtering rules in their email client, I suspect it would pay off for most of them pretty quickly."
This is so true. I did this several years ago at work, and anytime I get a new boss due to "re-org", I just create a new folder and a matching rule saying move all incoming mail to boss's folder (also makes a handy CYA for stuff). I finally did the same thing at home because of the same issues, I now have a separate folder for mailing lists, family, online shopping stuff, etc.
As far as the spam goes, I've had the same email address for almost 10 years, and rarely see spam. I believe this is due to 2 things: 1) If I need to "register" on some site to download a trial version of software or whatever, I use a mailinator address, 2) I have filters installed to get rid of it before I see it. I have to admit that my ISP actually does a really good job at filtering spam (Comcast, believe it or not), plus I use Thunderbird like one of the other posters said, and what does make it through is put in the junk folder.
A little common sense and learning how to actually *use* the features of your email client (I have to use MS Outlook and all of it's rules quirks at work) can really cut down on your email stress.
really people, it's not hard.
Once you get a response from a person, they go on your while list, everything else goes to an holding bin for 30 days. If no response, delete them, or move them to a 'delete' later folder.
For the relatives that might not understand, get there email and manually add them to your white list.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That is like saying that you're not going to drive anymore just because there are traffic jams. All tools have their pros and cons, but the good ones (which I believe email is) have pros that far outweigh the cons. A famous guy like Knuth just needs to have separate "personal" and "public" emails. The personal one gets a small amount of mail from friends, family, etc, and then the public one gets flooded with email that he can sort with filters and such (or even have someone else read). But dropping email all together is a "throwing the baby out with the bath water" solution.
Why would email be annoying or waste your time? Slashdot wastes more time than email for me and I only read it twice a day.
I check emails when I'm in the mood (roughly every two hours), delete the spam, and read whatever's new. Works great. Sometimes I defer answering them to sometime when I'm not in the flow of working something complex.
Email is great, very usable, very efficient, asynchronous and lets you communicate whatever you need.
Or they are the ones with 500 new messages in their inbox and never once mark all as read.
Having just switched employers, and my old employer used Outlook - new employer uses Thunderbird; yeah. . . 10 years of archived personal folders. ker-FLUSH!
I still have them on a DVD.
I just don't know when, or if I'll ever look at them again. Chances are; I could try to look at them at some point in the future, and completely fail to find the right software capable of opening the files.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If you asked Greta Garbo or Howard Hughes instead of Knuth, they'd have said "public places are dead", and while most celebrities are less celebrated... they are an edge case. Most people don't have that enough *legitimate* mail in their inbox to make dumping email a rational response.
Spam, now, that's a real problem... and it's a pity that the Direct Mail Association has consistently fought against any legislation that would have any real effect on spam, one assumes they share the common but misguided notion that it's impossible to create good anti-spam legislation that would allow the legitimate use of email in marketing (no, that's NOT an oxymoron).
But absent effective legislation what one might call "excessive promotional speech" is a problem for anything that makes communication more efficient. Were people to abandon email for some other medium, they'd find that clogging up just as quickly.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
But it has been coughing up blood for a long time.
No. Isn't Don Knuth dead? He doesn't reply to emails...
--
make install -not war
The only way I can deal with spam is to use a white list.
If you are not on my white list you go into my trash.
This means that you need to find some other way to get my
attention before I will put you on my white list.
This is simply for self preservation since I receive over 250
spam messages a day!
[while the narrator is on the phone with the police]
Tyler Durden: Tell him. Tell him, The liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perceptions.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Given Knuth's stature in the computer science community, having an email address that is publically known would be an invitation to be 'spammed' by anybody taking computer classes or doing computer research. I wouldn't be surprized to learn that he was receiving hundreds of emails a day in 1990.
By not having a public email address, those who want to make contact need to use other methods like snail mail, personal contact or email to a 'gatekeeper' like a publisher. It is more expensive in terms of effort, so you have to REALLY want to make contact to justify that effort.
Communications Control of that type isn't necessarily a sign of antisocial behavior. It can often be a filtering method designed to keep your workload down so you can focus on new stuff as opposed to answering 'CompSci 101' questions from the whole world.
It is similar to having an unlisted telephone number. Those who you wish to have easy contact have your number. Others have to go out of their way to use the phone as their contact method.
Is email just too hectic a communication form for some people?
Yeah, it is.
But then some people haven't mastered the art of wiping their own asses or making it through the day without drooling all over themselves first.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
To tell me how to avoid it. What's the forwarding address? Seriously, email will be around a lot longer than many other things IMHO. Mostly because it can be tracked, and has been accepted as testimony/evidence in Judicial Proceedings. This makes it not only valuable, but also a controlled form of communication. Yes, IM is still there. However it will never be as widely accepted as Email. Unless, they finally figure out a way to tax email...then I predict a massive shift to some other form of communications.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
It is the volume of communication people must deal with. At some point, all you are doing is communicating about communications you have received and sent.
I once refused to take a cell phone my employer offered to me. "Having a cell phone used to be a status symbol," I said. "But in the future the status symbol will be not having one, becasue you're too important to interrupt."
I do have a cell now, but I never answer it, unless it is a prearranged call, or a situation where I've agreed to take emergency calls. Otherwise everybody goes to voice mail. If I was available all the time, I'd never get anything done. I do pick up calls for one hour in the morning, and people know that if they want to pick my brain or do idle chit chat, that's OK. Otherwise, it goes to voice mail. I do try to make sure the few people who get my cell phone know the right numbers to call for most things.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Learning programming without computers would require that you know how to do things using various concepts like loops, If-Then branching, parameter sharing/passing, feedback, normalized database design and other things that are universal. Once you know how to 'program' that way, it is relatively simple to apply the knowledge to ANY computer language that uses those concepts.
The languages are just dialects that translate concepts into something the computer can use. Each dialect has its strengths and weaknesses.
If your 'paper' program works, then it would be relatively simple to write a converter that translates into a variety of computer languages. Of course, you would need to debug that 'paper' program first, which is where experience at paper debugging is essential.
In a sense, 'paper' programming and debugging is where the relatively recent technology of 'Design Patterns' stem from. (Of course 'Design Patterns' use a concept from architecture and Christopher Alexander's 'Pattern Language' book of the late 1970s.)
With that in mind, I wouldn't consider Knuth to be a Luddite. I would consider him to be someone who realized early on that the specs/logic, not the actual code, determines whether a program works or fails.
Email isn't bankrupt... some PEOPLE are. People overdose on anything... TV, drugs, food, and now email. Some idiots tie themselves to email, and have a fixation on replying instantly to any communication. They're the ones that are ill, not email. Admittedly, this addiction is widespread. But it's still a people problem, not a technological problem.
Raven
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
That begs the question, if we charged for email traffic (more for commercial and less for personal), then wouldn't spam probably pay for most people's internet?
Been using SoftScan for 4 months now (http://www.softscan.no/) for several of our domains.
:)
Nothing gets through.
Sure we pay a small fee, but hey... We don't spend any time sorting through loads of spam or virus e-mail at our company now
Ok, I can see I should have responded to this post. Honestly, I didn't think anyone would be gullible enough to actually think there is merit to it.
1) My post was NOT previously written by Oscar Wilde
2) No citation was provided to check it
3) Mods are idiots for marking me flamebait (for Yogi Berra comment, which was true) while giving this a +4 (for being not-true)
And no, I am not at all worried about the Karma. Just responding to the post.
Neo-luddite, huh? That's a new one to me, but hey, whatever...
If you can not understand the difference between a "My Humps" ringtone and a silent vibrate, then I can't help you. If you aren't distracted by it, then kudos to you -- you are unique. I do think, however, that most people ARE distracted by ringtones going off in the middle of meetings. Like I said before, its not the fact that you are being notified that is the problem. It is the method of notification.
So, luddite-basher, anything that makes excessive noise in a silent environment is going to be noticed. Talk all you want about generational differences but I think you missed the point.
Every time I post my phone number publicly some jokers call from who knows where faking arabic accents. Then my phone stops working.
Thankfully, anyone smart enough to do this with email is too busy making money. And the worst I get is spam....
How does anyone do business without publicly posting their email or phone numbers? The end is near.
(looks at calendar and counts years since 2005) The end was near.
Standard Slashdot practice.
Misleading 'Title'?
Posted by Editor on 10:02 AM May 25th, 2007
from the slightly-tangentially-related-joke dept.
Some_user writes:
"News story containing information about a tech-related company was reported in this link which is actually a link to a blog with a link to a blog with a link to a blog containing a post by a guy who read the headline on a bus advertisement as he was crossing the street. Further information is available also in this blog and this blog. Cursory and slightly misleading analysis follows initial statement, leading to a specious conclusion. Slippery slope question to spark flamewars?
|> defectivebydesign, hahaha, mafiaa, 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 (tagging beta)
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Geez, doesn't Editor read these things before he posts them?! This isn't even a complete sentence!
If you'd RTFA, you'd see that it has absolutely nothing to do with misleading titles, it's just about regular titles... of course, you can't see that because it's been slashdotted already! See the Google cache
And... in Soviet Russia, editors mock you!
The problem with email is that it's too simple to send so people engage in what I call corporate spam: they send out copious amounts of information to too many people. It's all too easy to send out a huge report to everyone in the company then claim that each person should have known whatever tiny nugget that was contained within the report.
Daily, I receive huge documents from many departments which don't appear to have anything to do with me in even a marginal way. Yet, every once in a while some 212 page report will have a line, "an application to handle this will be deployed on the intranet next Tuesday," buried somewhere on page 153 and I'm supposed to realize that I've been assigned a task. If I don't notice the line, contact the other department, attempt to get some requirements for the application, and explain why it can't possibly be done by next Tuesday with my current workload; I'll have several people accusing me of drooping the ball because they "sent an email."
I could easily spend all my time at work reading this corporate spam (which almost never pertains to me) and not write a single line of code. Instead, if someone has an action item for me, I expect them to contact me with notice of that. I just don't have time to wade through every document that someone, while reading it, thought a line in the report was interesting and they should forward the whole report to me.
For the parent post, remember, just because a thought about a person runs through your mind does not mean that an email needs to be sent. If it's not important enough for you to remember later then it's almost definitely not worth interrupting the other person's work and taking a greater amount of their time (often hours with the right off-the-cuff request.) You should attempt to understand what you are requesting of the other person and whether it's worth the their time before sending the email. I'm guessing the other guy in IT has been hammered by to much corporate spam and is pushing back.
Gmail's "conversations" concept is so far beyond the threading you get in a normal email client it's not even funny. It's hard to imagine the productivity improvement before you've tried it, but it's huge. A 50-long thread is just one item in your inbox. I don't even bother much with folders (tags, in gmail), because it's so easy to keep my inbox tidy. I do tag/"skip inbox" on mailing lists and email from my ISP, and that's about it.
Another huge boon: the Archive button. Gets crap out of your inbox fast, yet doesn't lose it. And it archives THE WHOLE CONVERSATION as a single item (which it is). Fiddling with selecting multiple messages is a freakin pain in the ass, but you don't even realize it until someone puts a feature in front of you that eliminates the need.
Another one (hand in hand with Archive): Search. "from:bill has:attachment" to search for that file bill sent you yesterday. Wow. So powerful.
And in a work environment, integration with Google calendar is invaluable, but that's orthogonal to the problem of dealing with the crap pile that is Internet email.
Summary: Gmail is teh rawk. It makes me not hate email.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
The flood of email is exacerbated by the fact that it is so easy to send. Therefore I propose: 1) Make it so emails take one hour to transmit. 2) Mandate a new, "SEND EMAIL" hardware button that requires 30 lbs. of downward force to activate.
I won't answer the phone, email, or even a knock at the door anymore. It's purely self-defense against UCE, junk faxes, telemarketing, and scam charity solicitations. I only accept email from a white list of family members and close associates, same with phone numbers, and faces at my door.
Seriously. I don't use email for work, anymore, and I've always refused to carry a pager or a cell (except for outbound calls).
Firing up an email client in 1989 was like being asked to read drafts of a peer-reviewed journal, with a little watercooler chat thrown in; firing up an email client in 2007 is like fending off a horde of squeegee kids. Other channels are equally, if not more, appalling. I blame debt collectors and fraudsters, partly; service providers, partly; anarcho-capitalism, partly.
In an uncouth world, splendid isolation has charms.
It's not like the snail-mail is spam-free...it just takes days instead of microseconds.
It's also a complaint against their system administrators- they're not doing their job. But, with so many companies hiring a 'book keeper' and letting them admin the sites, it's no wonder. And in the big shops, it's all about giving every corporate machine a 'flush-n-fill' every night to stop the virus problems, so they're really busy.
Thank Microsoft. Or to be more precise- thank the Microsoft mindset. You know, "This is best...and only thing out there." And "There couldn't be anything better- this has a logo in case there's a problem." (Nevermind Microsoft not being a support center, if you don't have $1M/year support contract.)
This isn't computing the way it used to be; it's computing at the pleasure of Microsoft. I'm tellin' ya: Linux is the way it used to be, back before Microsoft: it's your machine. It only fails when something's broken. You only reboot rarely. You retain complete control, AND it's fun. You guys starting in 1985 or later don't realize what it's become these days.
So you get spam; tell your admin!
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
...that these are the same idiots that went around telling us broadband was dead, and that all kinds of people were falling back to dialup?
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
Purging one's inbox seems similar to purging incomplete to-do tasks.
Sometimes, I make a judgement call to clear my to-do list of all tasks that fall under my pain threshold. I define the pain threshold as "what life impact will deleting this to-do incur?" I rate email requests similarly. If the request requires time to complete, I fire off an estimated time to completion. Also, I transmitted "this is not on my radar" messages.
Email is not dead. If a businessperson or academician decides to stop accepting email, then, IMO, that person commits career suicide!
I can understand the desire to abandon email if, all else being equal, spam has overwhelmed your inbox. However, I'm not so sure about those who claim to have too much "legitimate" email, at least in the context of workplace email.
...
My last company adopted a policy for email that included guidelines to help streamline email use.
An example of a guideline was a protocol for using "to:" and "cc:". Only people who absolutely needed to read an email were to be put on "to:" while "cc:" was to be used as exactly what it means, courtesy copy. This allowed people to filter on "cc:" and reduce the volume of priority email. I found, more often than not, that I didn't have to read my cc: filtered mail at all - and periodically either filed it or just deleted it.
Another example was minding when email was appropriate which depended in part on the urgency and content of communication. If something is critical - don't send an email, get up and actually physically talk to the person face to face (or phone, page, text or instant message them if necessary).
Email is fine if you don't need an immediate response or action and if you want to send a chunk of information for people to mull on. You don't want to get bogged down in "banter" in email - if something requires a discussion - have a face-to-face or teleconference meeting with all parties.
There is a lot more to it than this and, for the example of the company I was at, it fit into a much broader system of time and priority management that had the backing of senior managers (ie. everyone was expected to work that way).
I found that the only time I fell behind on email was when I was genuinely overloaded with work.
My impression is that people who think they have too much legitimate email fall into two camps. In the first, most of their email is not essential, although not spam in the 'free viagra' sense. It's just not essential in the sense that if they don't read it - they are no better or worse off than if they had.
In the other camp are people who actually have too much legitimate email, but this isn't the fault of 'email' per se - it's because they just have too much work to do...
I know my workplace email rules probably can't be applied for someone who is in the public eye like Lawrence Lessig, since no doubt he gets emails from hundreds of people who can't be expected to follow the "rules". He could, however, have a "public" email and an assistant tasked to be the first line of defense
Because you'll never know when you'll need it. Perhaps I'll need that CD key from 2 years ago. Or the phone number of the client who I forgot to add to my contacts. Or perhaps I want to know when I started a project, got an account, or switched jobs. Perhaps I'll wnat that paper I wrote two years ago.
There are hundreds of reasons that I can think of why I might need some email from two years ago. But, mostly, it's the reasons I can't think of.
It costs me nothing to keep my email permanently. It's on the server, it's someone else's problem.
Let's send him a hot tip about stock in a make-penis-fast venture. We can FedEx it on carved stone tablets. That ought to get his attention.
Then... let's offer him a great deal on loans for 6ener1c v1agra. We can have UPS deliver it on sheepskin scrolls.
Finally, we can offer him huge savings on gambling in Nigeria. We can have DHL bring it, tatooed on the side of a water buffalo. (DHL delivers anything!)
My set preference is for my eMail client to ask - then I let receipts go to those with whom I work. On the occasion that I request a receipt and do not get one within a reasonable time, I simply send a brief follow up requesting acknowledgement of the earlier message.
Certainly I have a preference for eMail. The telephone is the most rude instrument (both in standard and cell format) of the past two centuries. The person placing the call expects one to stop whatever one is doing and give the caller undivided attention for whatever is on their mind. At least voice-mail enables one to balance work and communication.
Timely, thoughtful communication is worth much more than instant blabbering.
...when you could just do
../mbox; grep -li "viagra\|penis enlargement\|prescription meds" *| xargs rm ../mbox; cd ..; rm -rf tmp
$ mkdir tmp; cd tmp
$ splitmbox
$ cat * >
to get rid of 90% of your spam. Ah well, those were the days...
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
The only good use of it,is what remains as legacy dependency.
Retrivieng passwords,notifications,and registration data.Some people still use it for mailing lists,but forums are simpler.
Unfortunately, retarded rhetoric is still alive.
you'll never know...
Perhaps I'll...
Or perhaps I want...
Perhaps I'll want that...
reasons that I can think of...
reasons I can't think of...
Can't you see a problem here?
It costs me nothing to keep my email permanently.
I'm not so sure.
Its sort of like how the USA makes laws (the Money for Soldiers' body armour and reduced chicken factory inspection bill) (i made that up, but it probably exists) - the title bears no resemblance to the content.
If outlook had a proper search facility it might be useable as an email program, but taking more than 5 minutes to search for a keyword just isn't acceptable when google can search the frikking internet in a fraction of a second.
At work in the company of course I use Email with outside clients and customers. But internally, I use quite often now IM and Skype now. Works great where faster communication with immediate feedback is needed, but you also want some sort of tracking.
But Email is still much more universally accepted.
Try telling your colleagues and boss at work not to bother sending email as it is dead.
It's pretty silly to draw conclusions from such an abnormal subset of the general population. Is the telephone dead because I can't call up the President on a direct line? Is it dead because I can't call Robert DeNiro? Is it dead because I can't call Steve Jobs?
Was snail mail dead in 1980 because Stephen King didn't personally read all his letters?
This is fairly preposterous. People who are famous or in a commercial position will always have far more people trying to contact them than they have time for. That's why they get secretaries and let it be known that they don't personally respond to every contact. They keep private, unlisted phone numbers/email addresses that filter out anyone but those on a whitelist.
This has no real relationship to the other 99.9% of the global population.
The term email bankruptcy dates as far back as 1999, though the written record only shows it as far back as 2002.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect