
Is Email = Efail? - sant0sk1
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001191.html
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sh1mmer
Is this just a long winded way of Jeff apologizing for being overloaded and
giving himself a get out of jail free card?

He included the simple truth "humans don't scale". Surely that's the end of
it.

Email or anything else isn't going to solve the problem that a single human
only has a finite amount of attention to give things.

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Maro
I think email "works" for 99.99% of the people, who get reasonable number of
emails from family, friends and collagues. I don't personally know anybody who
is having these problems.

There are a few personalities like J. Atwood and M. Arrington, who are in the
fortunate situation that everybody wants to talk to them, but email works for
everybody else. Also, it seems to me that if everybody would call them, or
text them, or IM them (as is suggested in the article) it'd be even worse.

If I'd be in their place I'd just set up an auto-reply that says "Sorry, I'm
overloaded, I may be unable to reply to your message."

I do agree that it's an interesting question how their Inbox could auto-
prioratize their messages so they can respond to the most urgent ones. But
99.99% of people have no need for this feature. (Being subscribed to tons of
mailing lists doesn't count, those are easy to sort out.)

~~~
davido
I agree. Gmail filters, username+keywork@gmail.com, or outlook filters make it
possible to "auto-organize" incoming emails. I'd be curious to know the stats
of filter use among Gmail regular users. I have dozens of labels and sublabels
as well as dozens of filters in Gmail.

For the regular Joe, I don't think email overload is a real problem.

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Tichy
What scares me is that I have given up on the spam problem months ago and now
just rely on the Thunderbird spam filter. So email is no longer a reliable way
to contact me, because of the danger of false positives. Meanwhile, the junk
mail folder contains thousands of emails, so there is no chance for sifting
through it by hand.

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ricardo
While it's difficult to keep up with a steady stream of lengthy emails, I
prefer that to phone calls. Especially when working with customers who tend to
ask the same question multiple times. I'd rather send an email and attach the
same file/text again and again than deal with the overhead of multiple phone
calls.

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Retric
If someone sends you a long email trash it or call them once. I find I can
process around 300 emails an hour if I just trash most of the unimportant
ones. The secret is the one line response. Yes, No, Sorry I don't have the
time etc. The older an email the more willing I am to just dump it into the
trash.

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unalone
Can somebody explain to me why email is so difficult to handle? I have four
open accounts and get regular email for school and personal business, and I
get the occasional set of messages about blogs, along with spam, and it still
takes me at most fifteen minutes to sort out.

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AndrewWarner
I wish email had a 140 character limit like twitter. Or that it allowed
nothing but subject line.

~~~
edw519
That's the best idea I've read here in ages.

Now what's the next step?

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joop
I'm about 3000 messages behind on my email. This article struck a nerve...

~~~
tomjen
CTRL+A, Del. You are never going to catch up in time anyway.

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sharkfish
So IM is better? 3000 messages in my inbox that I can attend to when I'm ready
vs. IM - where I'm dealing with everybody simultaneously and live? That's
worse than the telephone, IMHO.

Anyway, if you get the same query more than once, it is time to put the answer
into a wiki or blog.

~~~
bmj
I agree. I'm a big fan of asynchronous communication.

I only use IM for work and communicating with my wife during the work day.
Fortunately, we use Skype at the office, so I can minimize my exposure to
friends. I've discovered that even when I set my status in, say, Google Chat,
to "Leave me alone" people still contact me, so I just got in the habit of not
signing in.

I also don't have a high volume of email--even with list memberships, I
probably don't receive more than 50 emails a day.

