Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
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.
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
Dead? No. Annoying as shit and wastes a lot of my time? Hell yes.
But then again, so are computers in general, and cell phones, and almost any other modern communication technique that allows you to exchange information instantly. You as a person are expected to instantly reply to that information. That's like declaring the telephone dead 30 years after invention. It's really annoying sometimes, but no where near dead.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
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).
These articles that end in a rhetoric question are inspired from "Sex & The City" where the chick always finishes the article with something like "Does love exist? Are relations a dead-end?".
It shows complete journalistic amateurism. Supposed to catch the reader's attention by putting the reader in the article. Slashdot sucks.
But when it comes to dealing with large quantities of email, the best tactic I find is to delegate. Reply with the standard "Interesting point, what do you think is the best solution?" and then when they get back... "Great!"
Also, I use Thunderbird - I sorely wish someone would develop an addon which ranks email by historical levels of correspondance, length of correspondance, domain, etc.. Those who you write a lot to at length are bound to be more important, and need immediate attention.
I particularly like the guy at work who walks over to my desk and says, "Hey there, did you get my email?" when he sent it about 30 seconds ago. What the fuck is he doing? Sending me an email so he can come over and talk to me about whatever it is that's in the email and then wasting my time even more?
I've started taking the approach of answering "No, but when I do I'll let you know if there are any questions. Right now I'm kind of busy..." What I really want to do is bitch whip him with my mouse.
When properly used, I like email in that it provides an asynchronous means of communication which does not become time dependent. I can send someone an email at 2:30AM when I happen to awake and just check for an answer later that day or the next. If I really need an instant reply, there's always the phone.
But I do think there are a lot of people in the world who's email is effectively broken because they cannot keep up with the spam that comes in.
Could it get better if there were not so many owned machines?
Right...only old people in Korea use email right?
Seriously...I keep seeing these things about email and I can only guess it comes from people, maybe younger people, that aren't in the working world yet?
In business...email seems to be the #1 form of communication, be it site wide, or even working on projects within a team.
Most every place I work at...blocks IM for security purposes...so, that's not an option.
Outside of work..well, I'd have to say that email is still my main and prefered form of communication. With some exceptions...I don't talk long on a phone, usually just a quick confirmation "Gonna meet at the Bulldog for beers at 4:30? Yup. Ok, see ya there [click]". I often have numerous thoughts throughout the day pertaining to different people, I find it easier to shoot off an email to each one...rather than call right then. If I were to wait till I had enough to call about...I'd likely forget most of the ideas I had...
That being said, I have one friend that is the complete opposite. He works in IT, but, when he leaves work, it is like he cannot stand to touch a computer at home. He actually gets a bit uptight on emails for trying to plan things, etc...he insists on phone calls in person. It is actually a PITA for me with him at times, as that my other friends do quite well with email planning, etc.
I prefer to hang with people in person when I can, but, when I cannot, I prefer email to communicate with them. Pretty much anytime I'm at home or work, I have at *least* one computer up at all times, with email running 100% of the time...I can communicate almost real time with email if I want..and it happens at times...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I agree. Kind of like saying "Thank You".
I'd heard someone the other day ponder the question of "When did the phrase You're Welcome disappear? It has been replaced by No Problem". Strangely enough, I'd not thought about it much, and realized I too had started saying No Problem rather than You're Welcome, and have been noticing it with annoying regularity. So, now I go outta my way to say You're Welcome to people, hoping it wears off on them at some point.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
When properly used, I like email in that it provides an asynchronous means of communication which does not become time dependent. I can send someone an email at 2:30AM when I happen to awake and just check for an answer later that day or the next. If I really need an instant reply, there's always the phone.
Yes, exactly. That's the beauty of properly used e-mail. This is particularly true on large, collaborative projects (especially if some of the collaborators are in drastically different time zones) and it's nice for personal communication as well, since it gives you time to sit down and really think about what you're going to say.
The problem (besides spam, of course) is that a lot of people seem to regard e-mail as a kind of clunky-but-convenient chat program. They fire back uninformative five-word responses immediately and expect everyone else to do the same. Now, there are times when this kind of back-and-forth may be useful (e.g. exchanging code snippets) but honestly, mostly it's a useless PITA.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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've been tempted to filter out all my incoming e-mail that is not PGP or GPG encrypted. Or, at least, signed by the sender's PGP or GPG key.
That would cut it down enough to be easily manageable.
I'm afraid that the few people I do want to hear from would think that I'm not worth the effort.
So set up a whitelist.
If you are listed here, or GPG Signed/Encrypted: PASS
Else: Instant Trashing (Perhaps notification of reason too?)