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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?"
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.
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
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?
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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.
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no you get those because of ignorant people that have you email address and then let themselves get compromised.
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.
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!!!
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.
"Nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded."
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.
People need to read the book Getthing Things Done by David Allen.
No sig for now.
That's what the search feature is for. I have over 4000 messages in my Inbox and I intend to let that grow indefinitely because it makes it ridiculously easy to find exactly what I'm looking for. There's no benefit to moving the messages elsewhere or deleting them, it just makes things harder when you want to find an old message.
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.
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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
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
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.
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!
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.
Talent borrows, genius steals.
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.
Well, I think the advantage is there for email while working...the asynchronous (sp?) nature of it. If I had to answer the phone and turn from the computer EVERY time someone wanted to communicate with me, I'd never get things done...totally breaks concentration. However, I can be coding, or designing or whatever, see emails coming in...I can get to a point, maybe firing off a job to run, I can quickly read and answer a few, and alt-tab and voila, I'm back at work without the same break in concentration.
I find phone calls to be MUCH more intrusive on the work environment. The only thing that makes me less productive than phone call interruptions....are meetings.
But, everyone has their own style.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.