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.
Is Email = Efail?
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Re: Is Email = Efail?
#12Is 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.
Re: Is Email = Efail?
#13I 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.)
Re: Is Email = Efail?
#14So 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.
The difference is that people are more reluctant to IM you a question, and you can readily signal that you are unavailable.
Re: Is Email = Efail?
#15I 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 th…
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.