A Million Mails Away

I'm way, way, way, way behind on email again. I get hundreds of emails personally addressed to me each day to about a dozen accounts, plus hundreds of Web alerts and mailing list traffic. It's impossible to keep up. As a result, I've dropped many important conversations and probably missed many important and interesting bits of information that came to me through email. (In addition, since I no longer have time to check the spam filters, I'm convinced that with increasing regularly many normal emails from friends addressed to me are getting dropped before I even have the chance not to see them.)

I wonder if my problem -- being overwhelmmed by email -- will one day be everyone's problem, of if this problem will forever be the lament of people who know lots of people. I already know several people who have a robot that replies to every email they get,

I'm busy, so if you send me email, please don't expect a reply.

I know I've already had to shut off my Instant Messengers, but email is too critical for some things to shut off. And as long as the tap is open, the firehose runneth over...

Update, October 27, 2004. I'm not the only one who complains about too much email. Example: John Battelle is starting to find his rule of ten increasingly difficult to follow...

Comments

[Jeff]

You've got Gmail.

[Karl Elvis]

One email account.

I get enormous amounts of email. But I filter all of it, every account I have, to one account that I use for everything. Then I've got all my filters and autoresponders and everything in once place. Only way I can manage it.

[Anders]

I've had similar situations myself; it's really frustrating. I was considering contacting you through LinkedIn, but reading your most recent post; I'll leave you a comment and leave it up to you to respond/action id you feel like it.

Anyway - just noticed your interest in emerging technologies and thought I'd tip you off to visit http://www.rfidbuzz.com/, a collective blog on misc RFID-related news, privacy buzz and more...

Kepp up the good work with your blog!

[Adam]

Jeff, indeed I do.

Karl, that's the way most heavy email users I know do it. Still, several gigabytes of mail can bring any happy email client to a crawl -- which is the danger in 2004 of consolidating all email into a single account with filters and autoresponders. (Mail app, Eudora, Outlook, and Thunderbird -- I've brought them all to their knees!)

Anders, thanks for the link, I'm really enjoying RFID Buzz a bunch. I'm adding it to my "Peeps" list...

[Anders]

Cool; glad you like it :-) Thanks for the link! Happy blogging :-)

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

Too much of a good thing

"Forget spam -- our real conundrum is the overload of legitimate e-mail. But help is coming."

"If e-mail is so good, why does it feel so bad, especially for those of us who send and receive a lot of mail? Why can't today's dominant e-mail programs (such as Microsoft's Outlook or Qualcomm's Eudora) automatically prioritize your messages in your in box, or easily search for one old message hidden in a stash of hundreds of thousands? Why, instead, do we need to construct elaborate triage strategies -- sorting, filtering, filing, redirecting, etc. -- just to make sure we don't miss anything important? And, despite these, why do we still so often miss what is important, and why are we bombarded by the trivial? Why, most fundamentally, must we constantly work on our e-mail, vigilantly imposing our own schemes of order upon the incoming chaos, constantly guarding against getting behind, against the shame of e-mail bankruptcy?

The obvious weaknesses of e-mail have led many experts over the years to predict that e-mail's end is nigh, and today, tech leaders routinely pronounce e-mail dead. But the truth is not so dire. A host of companies, among them Google, have recently introduced some very novel e-mail programs, and are determined to make e-mail a little easier than it is today. They'll probably never make it perfect, but help is on the way."

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/07/16/e_mail/index_np.html

[Adam]

Wow, a lot of good nuggets in that Salon piece. Thanks, Dimitar!

great site

[Jason]

Somehow I found that you own one of the same CD's that I have from your list. Now that may not be very exciting but my question is, How did you come across it??? I met this artist in Phoenix back in 1995. I bought 4 albums from him and would like to know whatever happened to him. Oddly enough, you two share the same name.
Any insight into this would be great!
Thanks.. Jason

A810 Rifkin As You Lay in the Dream (3/94)

[Adam]

I met the artist in Phoenix in 1995 as well. I was in town for a conference and heard him singing in a public square and likes the music so I bought his album. I do think it's odd that he shares the same name as me, and I never saw him again.

Back to the topic of this typepad post, I noticed on John Battelle's searchblog that

For some reason, I grow uneasy if I have more than ten emails unanswered in my inbox. I'll stay at my computer late, I'll forego creature comforts, if it means I can get the message queue down to ten or less before I sleep.

Lately this has become difficult, as the number of fun and/or important time requests, or reads/groks/responds, or emails that force other actions have risen to the point where my inbox often demands more of me than I can reasonably give.

A quick spin through my inbox reveals: A great paper to read from a colleague; I can't respond to him till I read it, so it stays in my queue. There's an appointment to book when I next go to New York, and a Very Important Person who's emailed me wondering if we're on. But I can't confirm till I get an email from someone else, so...it stays in the queue. A voicemail from another New Yorker (I get vmail as email, thanks to VOIP), which I can't delete till I call them back, and it's too late to call, so the email stays in the queue. There's an invitation to a breakfast panel, but I am attempting to limit my time now, as it's All About the Book. Still, the person asking is great, and I would very much like to be in the company of smart people, it always proves fun and worth the time. I can't make up my mind, so ... the email stays in the queue. There are three comments from smart Searchbloggers, each with valid and interesting points which merit followup, but they require that I think, and think judiciously, and it's late, and my kids are home so... their email stays in the queue. And so on. I'm down to 15, but I can't seem to kill the last five....

I just want to say that since 1995 I haven't been able to keep up with my email queue. I think that was the point at which I crossed over to average over 100 (non-spam) incoming emails a day. In 2004, I average between 500 and 600 (non-spam) incoming emails a day -- and that's after unsubscribing to most mailing lists and setting the others to digest mode.

The comments to John's post are interesting -- I learned that Jeremy tries to keep his email queue at 100 and Timboy tries to keep his email queue at 10,000.

The policy I've developed is to randomly answer emails whenever possible -- and to not stress out about the fact that that is far less than what I'd like.

But I do think at this point I probably have left a million emails in my queue unanswered in the last decade. I just accept it as a fact of life.

[Bill Mitchell]

My desire to clear the inbox is a neurosis. Anything that sits more than a week must not be that important, yet I can't bring myself to delete it.

[Account Deleted]

There are at least three things about Kevin's comment that made Rohit smile: the invocation of physics, the notion that 30 is relative, and the thought of seeing you next week.

porno video sikiş sikiş porno izle porno porno izle sikiş sikiş dizi izle film izle