Rebirth of email depends on changing social attitudes.

Byline: David Tebbutt

Rebirth of email depends on changing social attitudes

David Tebbutt

Unless your organisation has bought into things like blogs, wikis and RSS feeds, I would guess that you are finding email as overwhelming as ever. For a start, there's conventional spam. Are you trapping it okay? Are you sure it's not trapping genuine emails too? If my experience is anything to go by, I'd say this is a growing problem. Do you scan the spam? Or trust the filters?

Then there's corporate spam, the masses of emails that are cc'ed or bcc'ed to you. How many do you actually need to see? Have you become so anaesthetised to them that you don't bother to read them any more? But what if one is really important and you missed it. "But I did copy you on that mail." Oh dear.

How do you cope when you return from holiday and realise that you have weeks of backlog to wade through? I knew a professor of IT once who had a simple solution -- he just didn't read email. "If it's important enough, they'll call me." Brave man. His only involvement with email was to tell the IT department to empty his inbox whenever they told him it was nearing capacity.

All the major organisations I work with would collapse without email. However, most of them can take practical steps to wean themselves off unnecessary email. They could abandon the ':cc' mentality for a start. Why do people do it? Is it backside covering? Spreading the risk? A "reply all" is the instinctive response, thus perpetuating the problem. This is better than leaving someone important out of the loop.