

Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013 - nickbilton
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/disruptions-looking-for-relief-from-a-flood-of-email/
Disruptions: In a world where we send 67 trillion emails a year, I started 2014 declaring &quot;Email Bankruptcy.&quot;
======
chimeracoder
This title reminds me of the line, "Nobody goes to that bar. It's too
crowded."[0].

I'm not sure why people love to insist that "email is broken" Email does its
job remarkably well. In 2014, it's one of the only communication forms that's
truly open, 100% cross-platform, and free-as-in-both-beer-and-freedom. If
there's something more you need, it's easy to write (or extend) a client that
handles your email according to whatever logic you set up.

The main complaint that I hear about email is that "we get too much of it".
But that has little to do with email itself, and more to do with how much we
_do_ these days. The pace of business in 2014 is faster than the pace of
business in 1964, and I'd wager that if you compared the volume of email today
with the volume of paper mail then, the increased velocity of transactions
would account for almost all of the difference.

Rather than trying to "fix" email by replacing it or extending the protocols
in incompatible ways, let's work on creating clients that do what we want them
to do.

[0] Currently the title is "Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in
2013", though I suspect that this may be reverted soon, given the HN policy.

~~~
raldi
In your analogy, does going to a bar correspond to sending or receiving email?
Because, "Nobody reads email anymore; they receive too much of it" doesn't
have any paradoxical self-contradictions.

~~~
greenyoda
For paradoxical effect, try: "Nobody _sends_ e-mail anymore. There's just too
much of it."

By the way, the original quote was from Yogi Berra: "Nobody goes there
anymore. It's too crowded."

------
pstack
Email is just fine. It lets you address things as you like, puts no time
pressure on you, and gives you a written record of your discussions. It's also
low-overhead and universal.

Don't blame email, if you can't create a few simple inbox filters to manage
the cruft for you. It has been many years since people actually suffered from
the weight of zillions of spam messages in their inbox. We've largely
addressed the spam thing. The non-spam stuff is going to be dumped on you,
whether it's in email or phone calls or text messages or instant messages or
facebook messages or instagram messages or whatever the fuck it is teenagers
are doing these days that makes email "irrelevant".

~~~
pixl97
>It has been many years since people actually suffered from the weight of
zillions of spam messages in their inbox.

And this is part of what makes email close to useless these days. Outside of
your own organization you have no idea if your mail was delivered or black
holed at a server somewhere never to be heard from again. Too many servers
still do the wrong thing, accept and delete, rather than reject at HELO.

You wouldn't care much if the post office dropped all the ads for $5.99 pizza
before they got to your post box, but if your bills got lost regularly you
would be unhappy, and that's the problem with email.

~~~
benihana
>And this is part of what makes email close to useless these days. Outside of
your own organization you have no idea if your mail was delivered or black
holed at a server somewhere never to be heard from again.

I work in the domain of email and I'm not really sure how you came to this
conclusion. I work on an internal team at a fairly well known e-commerce site
and because of a few simple metrics, we have very high confidence in our mail
being delivered. Not only marketing newsletters but also transactional emails
like receipts and shipping notifications.

~~~
wl
Speaking for myself, you've got reliable delivery for the kinds of emails that
matter least to users. I really don't care to receive most "transactional"
emails and I definitely don't care about newsletters. Meanwhile, my experience
with gmail is that I sometimes miss individual emails from human beings
because they got caught in the spam filter. This state of affairs doesn't make
email useless, but the system does seem to favor sophisticated bulk senders
with tons of resources to devote to the problem over real people just trying
to communicate something important.

------
incision
I think this article is conflating a couple of very different things.

* How much email is sent worldwide.

* How email is used in the workplace and the negative impacts of it.

* Ways to manage email in general and alternatives to email for personal (non-workplace) communication.

These are very different topics that can roughly be divided into workplace and
personal spaces.

* Yes, there's a lot of email being sent. It should be pretty obvious why as it's ubiquitous, easy, simple and reliable. Nothing wrong with that.

* Workplace email is a completely different beast. I ran some fairly large internal mail systems for many years. Workplace email isn't about communicating nearly as much as it's "The Record".

A place to record, prove, ass-cover, expose and obtain implied consent in a
way that is discoverable as evidence down the road.

The creation of anxiety and lost productivity here due to sheer volume and
massive CC/BCC escalation is obvious - a significant part of many modern jobs
is active defense of your own borders in a huge distributed audit trail.

* Inbox managers are nice, but they generally don't apply to the workplace, just as Twitter doesn't.

------
esw
>"Email is probably most invasive form of communication yet devised"

Oh, I find unscheduled phone calls much more invasive. They require that I
make myself available at that moment, and if I'm not in an immediate position
to talk, then I need to similarly inconvenience the caller when I return the
call.

~~~
lostlogin
Yeah, the writer of that statement hasn't done years of on call work. If there
is any form of communication more invasive than your third phone call after
midnight (and before 6am) after weeks or months of the same, I'd be surprised.
Instantly awake, instantly angry. Have a civil conversation, hang up the phone
and swear as you get dressed, drive in to work swearing, swear as you work,
drive home, swear into bed, rinse and repeat. And if one of the calls is
poorly worded or a mistake (>>oh good, you're awake<< or >>I was after the
house surgeon, not you<<), the instant ability to conjure up new sarcastic
comments was amazing. I quit and became mostly human again.

------
krapp
I find it odd that his solution to the 'invasive' nature of email revolves
around social media, a medium whose entire purpose for being is farming your
content and selling your data.

No thank you.

------
CharlesW
A link that will let you actually read the story:
[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDcQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbits.blogs.nytimes.com%2F2014%2F01%2F19%2Fdisruptions-
looking-for-relief-from-a-flood-of-
email%2F&ei=jwncUqaFLofzoATnwIDoAQ&usg=AFQjCNE4gqQnqjBAETbzZEf4X-Z6Cddghw&sig2=qijfOrf7D-eybWaHRTZH8Q&bvm=bv.59568121,d.cGU)

------
a3n
> Mr. Thompson said that in the workplace, email had become a major barrier of
> efficiency. “People feel the need to include 10 other people on an email
> just to let them know they are being productive at work,” he said. “But as a
> result, it ends up making those other 10 people unproductive because they
> have to manage that email.”

The solution to that is not to fix email, or to fix the secretarial pool where
memos used to be typed up with Cc lists, or to fix instant messaging or
whatever's next. The solution to that problem is to fix that problem, that
people feel insecure enough in their jobs (for lots of reasons) that they must
waste other people's time to help them declare "I am valuable."

------
alooPotato
One thing stood out to me in the article "make something free and easy and
people will do a lot of it".

What about this as a potential solution - in order to send an email to
someone, you have to pay something.

Here's how it could work:

1) You sign up for a service that autoresponds to all incoming email stating
that in order to send this receiver an email, they require at least X BTC.

2) The receivers inbox only shows email where the sender attached the minimum
X BTC. In fact the inbox is sorted by the amount of BTC attached to each
email.

3) The receiver keeps half the attached BTC and the email service keeps the
other half. This is the part I'm least sure about.

Thoughts?

~~~
gdne
Already been tried. It's called hashcash:
[http://www.hashcash.org/](http://www.hashcash.org/)

Coincidentally, hashcash's proof of work is the foundation of bitcoin.

But don't let this discourage you from trying your idea. I think it's still a
fantastic idea. Making email cost something to send (either btc or CPU time
like hashcash) would kill spam, and slow down the flow of over-communication.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
The merits of charging CPU time are arguable, but adding monetary costs to
sending email is absolutely immoral. Especially something like Bitcoin, which
has a steep learning curve.

Unless your goal is to transform email into a system more closely resembling
snail mail, but for cipherpunks.

------
thatthatis
Why do we still have forced ordering by arrival time?

When I sort my physical mail, I put it into piles and order those piles by
importance. When I sort my email, I can't.

In my physical mail I can choose the importance order and ad to the queues as
I wish. With email, not so much.

I want a gmail plugin that lets me order my inbox in order of priority.

~~~
jiggy2011
Outlook has let you do this for years, you can set various flags on mail
items, you can also do this for mail you send so that it will automatically
flag for the recipient.

The problem of course is that if you allow the sender to specify the
importance of an email they will flag things that are important to them,not
necessarily important to you.

~~~
greenyoda
Fortunately, Outlook also allows you to set up processing rules that reset the
priority of an incoming e-mail. No need to let senders specify priority for
you.

------
jiggy2011
I'm curious as to why so many people end up in the email hell, I can
understand if you are a senior person at a large company or some sort of
public figure/minor celebrity.

I just run a decent spam filter and ruthlessly unsubscribe from all commercial
newsletters. Things from mailing lists are auto-filtered into folders and
almost everything that's left is stuff that is pertinent to projects I am
involved with so it's stuff I need to read. On a busy day when I'm working on
2 or 3 projects I might get 20 emails.

------
joeheyming
TLDR; This article has no content. It just spews statistics about Email, yet
gives only one, non-thought-out, solution to dealing with lots of email.

Its just a sensational title, move on.

------
unlimit
I hear this every now and then from "the experts", but I am not sure if it is
broken in the first place. Email with a nice client is very efficient and
effective, it will not be beaten in the near future. What do we replace it
with? IM, skype, google hangout? Nope

------
greenyoda
The author includes the following quote, with which he apparently agrees:

 _“If email was invented today, it probably would not have survived as a
technology,” Mr. Suarez said. “Social and public sites are much more
efficient.”_

That doesn't seem remotely plausible to me. If a company wants to send a
message to a customer, a supplier or its lawyer, they're not going to do it on
Facebook (with its dubious privacy policies) or post it on Twitter (for
everyone in the world to read). And a sender can't rely on a recipient even
having a social media account on the platform they use. E-mail, like the
telephone, is both more universal and more private.

Also, in industries like investing or software development, where
communications need to be archived so that they're available for legal
discovery (e.g., SEC enforcement actions, or establishing prior art for patent
litigation), your company needs to have control over its own e-mail. Saying
"We can't respond to your subpoena because Facebook deleted our trader's
account for breach of its terms of service" won't make government regulators
very happy.

Finally, you might be able to declare "e-mail bankruptcy" in your personal
life, but if you work in the business world, you can't just throw away all
your e-mails after you return from vacation (unless, maybe you're the CEO of a
company). You co-workers and customers aren't going to appreciate your
dropping the ball on important issues. One solution would be to set up e-mail
filters so that e-mails can be categorized by priority and the urgent ones
replied to. For example, if you're a blogger for the NY Times, comments from
your readers shouldn't even be going to the same e-mail address as messages
from editors or news sources.

------
omarforgotpwd
Nice title.

"Email is broken. People are using it a lot."

------
mpotra
I'm deeply sorry, but the entire article is just a rant about personal
frustrations, and some figures thrown around. Nothing valid or worthy of
reading. Blogging at its finest.

First of all the term "email" refers to a technology, a means to deliver
messages. All of this is _brilliantly_ standardized by RFCs, which in my
opinion make it the most viable technical solution to open, free and reliable
messaging in the world. Yes, things can be improved - as always - but email is
and will be here for the long run.

What the author is actually frustrated about is the services he's using;
e-mail clients to be more specific. There are many ways to configure an email
server and client to filter out spam, unsolicited email and how to manage the
entire pool of emails received, by filtering and organizing.

If your Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo or whatever-client you're using doesn't do its
job properly, maybe try something else instead of blaming "email".

Email is not invasive at all. The clients (email software) can be invasive -
alerts, popups and all that - and the habits of an email user/consumer can
lead to messages being invasive. And on the above, if you're using free Gmail,
Yahoo, Hotmail or such, what do you expect? If you keep subscribing online to
all sorts of promotions, contents and newsletters, in the hope to get rich
overnight, what do you expect? Maybe next time when you sign-up for some free
service, you actually pay attention to those checkboxes that say "Yes,
subscribe me to this useless newsletters", before blaming "email".

I personally use email as my primary means of communication, especially when
it comes to business and on-the-record messages, but also personal when I
don't feel like having my privacy poked around by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
and other commercial services. It's not as fast as chat, but it's more
reliable and gives the other party the chance to reply when they finish their
more important business if any.

If you declare email bankruptcy, that just means you failed at managing your
communications behavior; which is a constant process, not a one-off. Too many
people expect email (and many services) to simply adjust to their personal
needs, without their smallest effort/input. There is no one size fits all, not
even on the internet.

And without email, we'd still be at the FAX stage.

------
qpleple
> When messages pile up, select all, hit delete, and declare email bankruptcy.

> Email: bilton@nytimes.com. Twitter: @nickbilton

Kind of ironic

------
sixQuarks
Email must be looked at as a "stream of information". No longer are you
required to read, respond, or organize everything.

The best thing is to archive everything once per week and forget about all the
unread emails. If it's really important, the sender will be in touch again.

