

Declaring Email Bankruptcy - cwan
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/05/email-bankruptcy.html

======
chime
Why not get a secretary? If email is the lifeline to your work-life then it
makes sense to pay someone $15/hr on a part-time basis to deal with the chaos.
A capable assistant can very easily organize your email saving you the time to
do what you do best.

Maybe there is an opportunity here for a web-based solution to this problem.
Of course he doesn't want to give someone access to his gmail account. So
maybe there's a way to selectively allow someone access to your inbox folder
with auditing/logging/organizing features. This way someone else can manage
your inbox but not go around snooping for password reset emails.

~~~
jacquesm
Email can be pretty personal, and in the end someone will have to answer it.

He's not even getting that much mail, if you count it out he says that 'from
the beginning of April to the first week of may' he went from a few hundred to
an unmanageable thousand.

That's only about 30 messages per day, if he simply kept up with it it would
not be an issue. Once the mountain is high enough it can be very intimidating.

Imagine not washing the dishes for a full month.

edit: changed spam in to mail, the point still stands.

~~~
aquark
We don't know how many emails a day he was dealing with. Clearly, he wasn't
ignoring email over this period, so many he was already keeping up with 30,
50, 100, 200 emails and this was just the excess.

~~~
jacquesm
That could be, he mentions 'unread', but reading 30 emails per day on top of
whatever he already read is:

\- if it was low, not a big deal

\- if it was high, percentage wise not such a big issue

So it would have to be somewhere in the middle, say around the 30 to 60 emails
on top of the ones he's already receiving for it to be a 'big deal'. And even
that does not seem to me to be an extraordinary high volume.

The thousand backlogged emails _is_ a big deal, that will take you two days at
least to get rid of.

But the majority of those probably does not require an answer, and if it
hasn't been read in 30 days it probably wasn't very urgent either and you may
be able to lose it entirely without it being a big deal.

People should not become a 'slave to their inbox'.

------
iamelgringo
Please someone make email better! This is a huge problem. Gmail is okay, and
it's the best web mail out there. Filters are really pretty useful, but as far
as I'm concerned, Gmail's two great innovations were 1) it's approach to
threaded conversations. IMHO it's "The Right Way" to do it and 2) archiving
email as opposed to deleting it.

But, it seems like they've really stopped innovating, and it really leaves a
lot to be desired. Labs features are nice, but not really game changers.

Gmail's contact management sucks. I have hundreds of contacts in my contacts
list from running the Hackers and Founders meetups, and I try really hard to
write notes and metadata about each contact after I meet them, but it's really
hard to get at those notes from an individual email.

Xobni really has the right idea with this. If I could easily change the
display of emails to threaded conversations ala Gmail and easily get the
archive feature, I'd make the switch over to Xobni + Outlook in a heart beat.

I'm more than willing to pay $10 -20 a month to someone that can solve this
problem for me....

~~~
lamby
Have you looked at the newer generation of text-based clients? The main one
thrown around is <http://notmuchmail.org/>

------
jplewicke
Have there been any email clients/plugins that used Bayesian filtering to sort
non-spam email into different categories successfully? For example, is there
anything out there that would let Fred Wilson automatically tag all the emails
he gets from entrepeneurs asking him to check out their sites and invest in
their companies?

~~~
jgrahamc
Well, there was this thing I wrote like 10 years ago called POPFile
(<http://getpopfile.org/>) when I had the problems that he is talking about. I
haven't looked back.

POPFile grew from POP only to lots of other protocols and many, many people
still use it.

~~~
patio11
Wait, you're THAT jgrahamc?! Whoa, small world. I nearly invited you to speak
in Japan about POPFile and OSS at the technology incubator that was my ex-ex-
day job, but our budget fell through. As far as I know our not-quite-ready-
for-primetime POPFile/Outlook integration is still protecting a few hundred
desktops next to a rice field.

~~~
jgrahamc
Whoa. Are you talking about QuickPOPFile?

I would have happily come to Japan and spoken, I've been there before and
always loved the place.

~~~
patio11
QuickPOPFile was not quite us, but the general idea to make it useful for non-
technical folks was similar. (We were going to aggregate filtering across an
organization, on the assumption that most folks couldn't be bothered to train
emails. Turns out this is easier to do if you are Google than if you want to
run a parallel mail infrastructure alongside the one that actually delivers
mail.)

------
RyanMcGreal
>But the more efficient I get with email, the more of it that comes in.

Jevons Paradox: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox>

------
rabidgnat
Keeping your email under control requires an unreasonable amount of
discipline. I've managed to avoid 'defaulting' on my email so far, but at a
decent overhead rate: Every hour or two, I wipe out my inbox completely and
leave only items that absolutely require an action. Most mail is read once and
interesting email gets archived by sender name. I have lots of filters set up
for people who usually send me uninteresting mail. Everything else is deleted.

I've almost lost control a few times - mostly because of vacations- and I'm
certain that I'll hit a tipping point where my time doesn't scale to my inbox
size. I couldn't handle my boss' email load, for instance...

Are there any good techniques that scale for dealing with email?

~~~
AlisdairO
Some email, you absolutely need to respond to immediately, and fair enough.
For anything that isn't totally urgent, try replying a day or two later. You
can stick a reply in a draft folder and fill it out later. This slows down the
flow of new email: it cuts out the sorts of mail where you're going back and
forth several times in the same day.

------
jacquesm
Looks like someone is in the need of better spam filters.

Just for fun I disabled the spam filter on our mailserver for a few minutes a
while ago, took me hours to clean up afterwards. The spam volumes are simply
unbelievable, but with proper filtering it really isn't that much of a
problem. I think I get about 20 to 30 spam messages per day nowadays that
somehow make it past the filter. I do update the filter rules with every
message that gets through though, usually on subject or body keywords.

~~~
tuxychandru
But he says they're all non-spam mails.

~~~
jacquesm
Ah yes, my bad! thanks!

But that's _only_ 30 emails per day!! Where do I sign for that?

~~~
chime
> Where do I sign for that?

If you want fewer emails, you need to stop signing up willy-nilly.

~~~
jacquesm
Nah, most of the email I get is because I've built up a fairly extensive net
of personal contacts over the years and email (rather than say facebook or so)
is my preferred way of staying in touch. The contacts are both business,
private and 'mixed', and I really don't mind the volume, it's just that 30
sounds like a great number.

I reply to emails usually very quickly (unless I'm sleeping), even if they are
a bit more complicated because I know that if I let it slide the 'mountain'
will start to look too high to me to.

It's mostly a matter of discipline.

------
mootothemax
Doesn't bankruptcy imply a _lack_ of emails? ;)

When it comes to dealing with spam, I'm often tempted to change my email
address of ten years and start off with a blank slate. I'm genuinely curious
to see how long it would take to ramp up. I rarely hand out my
[myname]@example.com address, instead using [companyname]@example.com - so,
amazon or somedodgywebsite@example.com and then filtering spam depending on
that. Is it time to start over?

~~~
hga
Think of email as bills, which need to be paid/responded to.

