It is pretty commonplace for someone to bemoan how terrible email is today.
If email was an employee, I’d fire them for incompetence.
— rands (@rands) April 18, 2015
I’m not one of those people. I happen to like email quite a bit. Actually, compared to above, I’d ask if maybe we shouldn’t be fired instead of email. Maybe we, as a hypothetical manager of email, should be fired for being a bad manager of said email.
Email can definitely be unwieldy, but I look at it a lot like notifications on smart phones or answering cell phones or watching television or … most things where we can get obsessed with.
Email is asynchronous, open, distributed, and reliable. It is cheaper and easier than a hand-written letter (so it can be used in many more instances) and you can control it by turning things off.
Today, however, you do need to manage email more than when it was not as ubiquitous. This might mean being more careful with where you hand out email out, using the SPAM reporting functionalities, and maybe filtering some of the emails.
I don’t, however, think that is too much to ask.
I like email and I am glad it is going to stick around.
2 replies on “I Like Email”
People seem to put a higher premium on the communication method the more ephemeral it is. Email sticks around too long for them…heck even texts are too permanent. So those Snapchats are way more valuable.
It’s a struggle for many folks to deal with the daily onslaught of data and information. Email seems to be a strong hang-up for many.
That’s one of the best things about email … that it sticks around. I still feel email is the best bad communication platform we have. Controlled by no one and yet able to be used by everyone.
Well, Google wishes they could control it … stupid Gmail IMAP implementation.