Short Post: Is Email Dying?
I hate email.
If it weren’t absolutely necessary for my work and general communications with my loved ones I’d turn off email in a heartbeat and never look back. Regularly, I tell people not to email me if it’s urgent, just to call.
Right now, I have:
- A corporate account for work
- A generally findable Gmail account, which is also the address that receives emails from various contact forms on the web
- Another Gmail account for newsletters
- An old EarthLink account that I’ve had forever but should get rid of
- Three random accounts that I check only passively and that get newsletters
- My ultra-private account that I only use to contact actual people and vice versa
- Facebook, where I increasingly get email from friends for reasons I don’t understand
The last few days I’ve been getting more spam on ALL of my addresses. And more ridiculous “CC the world” emails from the world, and more endless threads that don’t take into account how much email clutter there is.
I’m consolidating as fast I can, but that just makes the remaining streams BIGGER.
I spend so much time on email that I have trouble getting to other forms of work.
I fantasize about declaring email bankruptcy every day (see this post from about a year ago for context).
Deliberately, I transitioned from my trusty old Treo 700P to a 3G iPhone because the virtual keyboard on the iPhone makes it harder to type… so I can’t do as much email while I’m away from the computer.
It’s only helping a little.
Is it just me?
2 Responses to “Short Post: Is Email Dying?”
1 Brent 27 August 2008 @ 1:30 pm
- It isn’t just you, it is also all the Gen Yers who are using text messaging and cell phone calls more than email.
- This post makes me want to send multiple messages to every email account that I know of for you, several times a day, just to be perverse.
- NINE email accounts? Yeah, uh, that’s the problem. What you need is at most four:
1) Work
2) Personal, with filters for newsletters and/or ecommerce
3) Abuse targets (for when you are compelled to leave an email address but you in no way want to be communicated with by those requiring it)
4) Facebook (which is sort of email and sort of not, and would be better if it were somehow integrated with regular email, but since regular email is stuck in 1989, that’s unlikely to happen for a while.
Good luck with all that…
2 David 3 September 2008 @ 7:42 am
I don’t know whether it’s dying, but it will certainly have to evolve — whatever happened to the potentially spam-killing notion of charging senders a tiny fee if the recipient doesn’t accept an email? Small enough (pennies?) not to be a major nuisance if it happens only occasionally, but enouugh to deter those who send out bulk emails wantonly or indiscriminately.
As for me, I have more or less the exact four-account setup Brent describes above. Maybe we’re related.
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