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Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

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Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#31

Post by jedberg »

alooPotato wrote: post #5

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 sho…

You would need a way for me to whitelist or discount senders.

I don't want my wife to have to pay to send me an email.

I don't want personal contacts to have to pay.

I don't want people offering me (good) jobs to have to pay.

You have to figure out a way to solve these problems without me having to review each email to determine how much it should cost.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#32

Post by lostlogin »

esw wrote: post #20

>"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.

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>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.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#33

Post by benihana »

pixl97 wrote: post #19
pstack wrote: post #3

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 sp…

>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…

>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.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#34

Post by VLM »

chimeracoder wrote: post #4

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…

"the increased velocity of transactions would account for almost all of the difference."

Don't forget the reduced cost of CYA. One reason I have 2208 emails in my deleted folder right now is a server I don't care about in a state I don't work in which provides a service I don't care about is down, so hundreds, perhaps thousands are being spammed. But we can't limit that because "what if you needed that info" or "one time someone didn't get an important notice and ..."

I get around an email per minute and its my fault if I don't read an important one. Almost all, of course, are unimportant.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#35

Post by 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."

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#36

Post by aroch »

jedberg wrote: post #29
thatthatis wrote: post #24

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.

Gmail has a feature called priority inbox -- it does almost exactly what you want. Within the priority section it is still sorted by time, not by priority. I've always wanted an inbox that sorted purely on priority.

Unfortunately, gmail marks everything (well, 99%) as "priority" despite my training it for many months.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#37

Post by jedberg »

aroch wrote: post #36
jedberg wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail has a feature called priority inbox -- it does almost exactly what you want. Within the priority section it is still sorted by time, not by priority. I've always wanted an inbox that sorted purely on priority.

Unfortunately, gmail marks everything (well, 99%) as "priority" despite my training it for many months.

Interesting. It's actually almost flawless for me. Have you done bulk training? Do searches for groups of messages you know are and are not priority and mark them in bulk. This seems to have helped me immensely.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#38

Post by aroch »

jedberg wrote: post #37
aroch wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, gmail marks everything (well, 99%) as "priority" despite my training it for many months.

Interesting. It's actually almost flawless for me. Have you done bulk training? Do searches for groups of messages you know are and are not priority and mark them in bulk. This seems to have helped me immensely.

I have, it doesn't seem to help much if at all. I'm not entirely sad, I already tag my emails by contact group and what vhost/catchall they show up at.

Strangely, it works fine in my non-GApps email.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#39

Post by 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.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#40

Post by greenyoda »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #27
thatthatis wrote: post #24

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.

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.

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.
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