Is email dying?
Two recent developments are leading me to wonder.
The first: David Schreck, author of the dogged, well-researched B.C. political website StrategicThoughts.com sent an email today to his email list announcing that - well - he'd be sending no more emails to the email list and that people would have to go to the website to view his columns, instead of having them hand-delivered in their email mailboxes as they came out.
Said David: "Bad addresses, spam filters and other hassles have made me eliminate the email service. It is too much trouble."
The second came in the form of a Register article, "People turn back on email 'cos of spam", which coincidentally, arrived in my inbox about half an hour after David's. According to the article, "The huge increase in email spam in recent years is beginning to take its toll on the online world. Some email users say they are using electronic mail less now because of spam."
In David's case, the problem isn't with spam; it's with the defences against spam that are blocking out legitimate emails, such as his.
I had an experience with a rogue spam filter a few weeks ago. An ad account rep at a local paper sent me an urgent email reminding me that my ad copy was due. Unfortunately, she put the word "ad" in the subject line; which caused the spam filter to throw the message away. I never received it. Luckily the sales rep took the initiative to phone me a few days later to ask why I hadn't responded to her email.
So, you can't trust email to get through. (This is besides the long-standing caveat that just because someone has an email address, there is no guarantee that 1., that address is legitimate/active; 2., they read their email in a timely fashion or 3. that they're not on vacation or sick or their computer or network isn't broken down.
Another factor that is rendering email increasingly non-useful is the tendency for some people to mark all their email urgent. More and more emails are popping up in my inbox with that annoying "!" beside them. To coin a phrase, if everything is urgent, then nothing is urgent. If all the emails in my inbox are marked urgent, then which one do I answer first? There's one there right now, flashing its annoying "urgent" status at me. I'm going to ignore it. I would have opened it except for that damn exclamation mark.
Posted by wetcoast at October 26, 2003 08:40 PM