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?"

Dead

[letxa2000]

"Is email dead?"

No.

What we have here is a failure to manage

[patio11]

I know having 2,500 emails unread would cause me stress. It used to. Here is how I learned to cope:

* POPFile to weed out the overwhelming majority of the spam. If you've got 4 spams to 1 legit email life seems pretty freaking unimaginably difficult, and nowadays my server inboxes are closer to 100 to 1. My actual client inbox is about 1 to 100 thanks to POPFile.

* Automatically filter automated emails (trade confirmations, bank statements, EBay whatever, anything without a human on the line) to a "I will probably never need this but just in case" folder. This generally requires setting up one rule in your client per business you do business with, or if you're like me you double up on the POPFile goodness and tag them all "auto" then just move based on that tag.

* Check email twice per day, moving every email out of the inbox after it is dealt with. Anything left in your inbox should be a pressing work matter -- if not, move it out, its done. In between my scheduled email checks I only fire it up if I'm looking to make some work for myself. If someone thinks they need a response immediately and I care that they think they need a response immediately, then they have my phone number.

* Get on with life.

Re:One solution to spam

[AutopsyReport]

Actually I find Thunderbird quite good. Up to last year I used Outlook until I found a need to organize emails belonging to multiple addresses, so I was recommended Thunderbird. In addition to doing what I wanted it to, Thunderbird also eliminated the spam I was receiving. Now spam is immediately sent to the Junk folder. Anything that snakes its way through is tagged as junk and I never see it again.

And the "fix" for email gets closer

[sholden]

There's a fix for email, which is scrapping the current infrastructure completely and setting up an incompatible system with whatever security/authentication is required to keep the signal to noise higher.

It has to be backwards incompatible so it doesn't just bring along all the spam problems, and to do that enough people have to say "I'm done with email and will no longer have an email address, I'm using this instead if you want to "email" me you'll have to too".

Just like all such things a critical number has to be reached for it to happen...

Re:Its morally bankrupt.

[cayenne8]

"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."

Why not set up your own email server? It is much easier to write rules and such to process your email on that end, rather than trying it on the client end. It is pretty easy...even for something fairly complex like virtual hosting (slightly outdated) [gentoo.org] using Gentoo and Postfix. You can write your own scripts to handle incoming/outgoing email, filter it, alter it...etc. All for free, and just exactly like YOU like it. Heck, run it for your friends too...and then they can benefit from your work too and have better email experiences.

Not rocket science..just takes a little effort. I'd also recommend the O'Reilly book on Postfix, has great explanations on email, how the protocols work..and how to set things up.

Re:GTD

[dgatwood]

Wow. We both got modded down as "troll". Guess someone doesn't like Dead Like Me [wikipedia.org]....

The reference was that there was an episode of DLM in which Delores was really into "Gettingg Things Done". It was a hilarious episode. To the 14-year-old son of a network exec on a power trip who modded us down, you should get out of your parents' basement and watch it sometime. You might just find it funny.

Or just wait for the movie. I hear they're about to make (at least) one.

Back on topic, though, yes, email is bankrupt. In ten years, IM will support sending messages to people while they are away, will be so standardized that people can communicate across IM services, and will do so in ways that make it much harder to use IM for spamming. At that point, most folks will view email as an anachronism, largely because of the abusive behavior of a few idiot spammers.