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?"

Comments

One solution to spam

[uradu]

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.

i hate these "email is dead" stories

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:i hate these "email is dead" stories

[jfengel]

According to the article, Knuth gave up on email in 1990. I know that as a Stanford processor he's on the cutting edge, but 1990 was way before email became something that everybody and his brother had. I suppose the term "spam" had been coined, but Canter and Siegel were still four years off. How much email could the man have gotten?

So I concur with you that he just didn't want to talk to people. And that's funny, because email is a wonderfully standoffish way to communicate. I'm not on the hook to respond immediately. You and I don't have to be ready to talk at the same instant, the way you do on the phone.

I just played phone tag for two weeks with one bastard who didn't return most of my calls. If he'd give me a freaking email address he could have dashed off a note with the binary answer I needed in 30 seconds any time he wanted. (Literally, all I wanted was a yes-or-no answer. Dipstick finally called me this morning.)

Of course, this is the same Don Knuth who proposed that programming classes should be taught without computers, and you expel any student who writes a compiler for the language you're teaching in. He wanted to get students to be good at paper debugging. So maybe the inventor of TeX is just a luddite.

Re:i hate these "email is dead" stories

[bcrowell]

I've communicated with Knuth, and I found him to be anything but a standoffish, asocial curmudgeon. I thought I might have found a typo in his book, and thought I might have a chance at getting one of his famous checks that he sends to people who find errata. (If I'd gotten one, then, like most recipients, I would have framed it instead of cashing it. It turned out that the "typo" was just an unusual-looking diacritical mark on a Hungarian name.) He wrote back a very friendly, gracious email, with an explanation. Knuth doesn't have anything against social contact or communication AFAICT -- he simply wants to have some control over how it takes place and how much of his time it's going to take up.

I feel the same way, really. The college where I work gave me an email an email address when I started teaching there, in 1996. I haven't read any mail sent to that address since 1997. (I believe my box is actually over its quota, and therefore messages sent to it are bouncing.) One of the reasons I don't read mail sent to that account is that there's an easy to use broadcast address, of the form mydivision@myschool.edu, that causes mail to go to that address. Therefore any address on that broadcast list gets a ton of what's come to be known as "occupational spam."

For the e-mail address I actually do use, I use it on my own terms. For example, I have a filter that automatically bounces mail sent in html-only format, or mail that comes with images as attachments. With my students, I require them to use a web-based form to send me mail, because otherwise I get, e.g., mail from students with aol addresses, whose names I can't infer from the mail, and mail with attachments in Word format which could have been sent as text.

Re:People are too easy to distract

[robably]

Stop checking it so often and learn to prioritize

A nice side-effect of this is that people stop expecting a reply from you immediately, and so tend to stop sending you so much pointless shit. It's win-win.

Re:Of course!

[porkThreeWays]

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.

Re:Its morally bankrupt.

[symes]

So that's why I keep getting all of those Viagra and Cialis spams. Think yourself lucky... I just get loads of weight-loss spam without so much as an inkling of sexual innuendo. Someone's trying to tell me something.

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.

Re:Of course!

[tacocat]

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?

Re:Along with the mainframe

[cayenne8]

"Yup, e-mail is dead. And so is the mainframe computer."

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...

Re:People are too easy to distract

[cayenne8]

"I guess that's just English upbringing, if you interrupt someone you apologise, I suspect in many case its become empty phrases...the social niceties still make a difference I think"

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.

Re:Of course!

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.