These days I’m becoming increasingly more frustrated with email as a communication tool. My inbox and related subfolders are absolutely FULL of stuff that isn’t spam, but which I’m starting to consider spam. Things like emails from social networks that you might have signed up for long ago but don’t use anymore, and no matter how many times you try to unsubscribe they still email you, and I still don’t mark them as spam. Then there is the torrent of emails coming in from all the social networks and various entertainment, online shopping, reference, ridiculous, why-was-that-interesting sites that I registered to over the course of the past five years. All their marketing shit comes in, and my filters just can’t keep up, so consequently it ends up in my inbox. It’s not really spam because they’re online services I do technically use, and some of them I even willingly signed on for newsletter updates, but it just never ends.
Now the few emails I get from friends, who have all moved over to Facebook and Twitter for keeping in touch and sending out updates, all get lost in this other stream of spam-but-not-spam. I could spend the next two weeks diligently putting in new filters to move all the crap stuff to folders where I won’t have to look at it, but then now matter how diligent I am, it’s really fighting a losing a battle; or trying to empty water from a boat that’s leaking like a sieve.
What to do?
I’m considering giving up on email entirely. After all, nearly all of the friends that I communicate with have moved to either Twitter or Facebook. The ones that don’t write regularly (some of them with the frequency of a corpse) still use email. I could cut my losses and just never talk to these people again, but then, I do like some of these people quite a lot and it would be a terrible thing – much like clubbing a baby seal to death – to just abandon them because they don’t fit my communication profile anymore.
Having said that, my gmail account, which is a clearing house for around 15 different email addresses is just one big junk box with a sparse few emails that I think are worthwhile and make me happy to read. It’s insane that in this day and age of putting a robot tractor thingy on Mars that I can’t filter my email and make it work for me like it did 8 years ago. It seems the older email gets the more frustrating it gets, the more I wish I didn’t have to use it at all. I’ve been on Wave now for a couple of weeks and while it shows promise, it’s definitely not there yet for a communication tool, and when it is it will probably suffer from the same problem as email now.
No, this problem won’t go away until it’s solved; a lot like testicular cancer, and just about as painful. Maybe I too should make the jump completely over the fence to the Twitter/FB groupies and give up email altogether. I bet if I did that, then in a week I wouldn’t even miss email. Or maybe notice that I miss email. That seems just as likely. Maybe this isn’t even my problem to solve as I didn’t invent email, I just use it. Somebody else should be held accountable.
Well whoever is to blame, the fact remains that I hate email, and I the only reason I use it is because of hangers-on types that insist still on using it. So while I will continue to use email so as to not alienate them, doesn’t mean I like the sound of fingernails being dragged down the blackboard.
Andy.
Well, I for one won’t be switching to Facebook or Twitter to keep in touch
More seriously, though, I went through a similar thing something like 6-7 years ago or so. In my case, it wasn’t a case of technical limitations of email, but one of my mindset that nearly caused me to abandon email.
I then tried out DSPAM on my email account. It’s a purely Bayesian spam filter based on the same ideas as outlined in Paul Graham’s Plan for Spam.
The beauty of such a spam filter is that it doesn’t really classify your emails as spam/ham by some criteria imposed on you, but rather as undesirable/desirable by the criteria you provide to the filter based on your training.
It took me a bit to realize that I don’t really care about whether an email is ham, spam, or bacon & sausages with a side-order of spam, spam, spam, spam and spam. All I care about is whether it’s in my inbox or not. That makes such a Bayesian filter the perfect tool for me.
It doesn’t provide perfect accuracy, but when I checked just now it’s accuracy was at 98.859%. That’s 98.484% of undesirable emails quarantined, and 0.073% of desirable emails accidenally quarantined. I’m really very happy with those results, and can recommend DSPAM to anyone on that basis.
Also, it let’s me stay connected with people I like.
Hi Jens,
Thanks for the referral, that does look like a great solution, the problem is I committed myself to gmail about 4 years back, before which I ran my own mail server. I like the cloud convenience of gmail for not having to doggedly make backups, and the fact that I no longer have to religiously monitor my mail server uptime. Also I like their webmail interface.
It’s not a perfect solution (I don’t believe there is such a thing), but it works pretty well for me. There are downsides, all that desireable/undesireable content going into my inbox is one of them. I like that classification by the way, as it perfectly describes email content.
Whatever I do is going to have be something that fits in with my gmail paradigm. I’m not closed to the idea of migrating to my own mail server again, but the advantages would have to outweigh the admin overhead, which can be quite severe when you have mail server outages that need work immediately. DSPAM does go a long way though to being a solution that would encourage me to do so.
You’re such a luddite, shunning FB and Twitter for modern communication
A.