The Fall of the Pop-mail Generation
Too many anecdotes have come my way that suggest a serious social-cultural crisis is brewing. The symptoms include feeling overwhelmed and behind the times; friends and family offended by one person's unresponsiveness; tasks dropped or not completed; seething anger brewing over your or someone's irresponsibility. You or someone you know is developing a reputation for uncharacteristic flakiness or a tendency to forget. You or someone you know doesn't do what he says he will do.
These are the symptoms. The results are broken friendships, unraveled professional lives, and personal depression. The devil may care, you say. But it's not the devil that's the problem. It's the people you love and who love you who are resenting you and thinking that your life is falling apart.
All of this is a very serious matter, but the root cause of it is oddly mundane: the failure to manage email.
I know of several dozen cases such as this. People with chaotic inboxes are embarrassed to admit that they have a problem. They try to walk away from it, but when they return, the mess is worse than ever. They begin to resent people who write them, and those who write resent not being answered in a timely way. The situation takes a while to fester but ultimately can end in disaster.
This is happening to many people in a certain age bracket, those who can count themselves among the pop-mail generation. I am among them, so I know the mentality well. Pop mail was the first method by which we received email. Email was an electronic form of the real mail. It was something that "arrived" and planted itself on our computers in the same way that regular mail arrives in our mailbox.
We have an inbox. We have an outbox. If we are really organized, we have folders and we drag these physical things around and plant them the way we file our receipts or bills. And we keep these things. We keep them for years, the same way people once kept letters. We have archives of email dating back to the mid-1990s.
The programs we used were called Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, and, more recently, Thunderbird. Young people know nothing of these programs. They don't know anything about SMTP settings, outbound mail servers, and the like. Email has no physical analogy. It is nothing more than an electronic communication and should be treated as such. They are messages. They come to the phone, to one's social-network inbox, and also to one's webmail account.
But older people like myself have had a terribly hard time switching out of the pop world and into webmail. We resent it when people tell us how old hat we are. We briefly try some webmail gadget and don't like it because it doesn't seem real or physical. We wonder about security and who can read our messages. So we stick with the pop system, swearing that we will be buried with our email clients.
And yet there are problems. No mail client on the planet was designed to manage the amount of email we receive. No mail client can keep a backlog of 3, 5, 10 years of email. At some point, the thing gums up. It crashes. Our inbox is wiped out. Why? We search the forums. We ask the geeks. No one can fix it, so we start over again with the same idiotic system. Eventually it crashes again, and we curse the makers of Outlook or Eudora.
For some, this system has led to even greater social disasters. The inbox has hundreds of messages piled up and unanswered. These people are so panicked about it that they can't form coherent answers to questions that people ask. They get angry, and others get angry at them. Then there is the problem of syncing home and work and travel computers. We get messages on one that do not appear on the others.
We try to cobble together convoluted systems: remove from server here but leave on server there. Get a copy here but if deleted it deletes from both places. It makes sense for a time but there are bugs. We lose things. We should put our minds to it and change our settings in some way, but who wants to fiddle with all that? Down with the whole thing!
But there is no escape. The messages keep coming in: 20, 50, 100, 300 per day. Some are important and most are trivial. We lose the mental clarity to distinguish between them.
Then there is the spam problem. If we use an older client, we get one good email for every 10. We try spam controls but they don't work well. Or they work too well, and we miss important messages. We know that we can dig through our spam box but who has time for that anymore?
I'm a survivor of this system. I suspected the problem two years ago, and advised people to make the switch to webmail. I knew it was the right thing. Did I switch myself? No. I held on to the pop mail method, secretly fearing a change. I worried about my archive, my address book, and I certainly did not want another email address. So I kept it up. Finally it became too much, and in one dramatic day, two weeks ago, I changed. Laugh if you want, but it was one of the most difficult decisions of my adult life.
Now I wonder what I was thinking. My main email is now hosted at Mises.com, which runs a gmail-style interface. There might be other good systems out there, but let me describe how gmail works. It organizes your email the way you actually use it, and in ways you might not even know you use it. It organizes email by date of arrival and then stacks conversations according to the subject. When you reply to an email, the file containing this email is displayed along with your response. When the reply comes back again, it is displayed with the entire history of your conversation.
This is a tremendous luxury that no pop-mail person would think of asking for because it seems too complicated. It's not complicated for gmail. Now when I get an email that says "yes, please run it," I don't have to wonder what the heck the guy is referring to. Now the entire history of the correspondence is right there. I'm ahead of the game.
Gmail includes folders such as inbox, outbox, etc. but these are just formalities. Every email you have ever sent or received is immediately accessible. This is really important for attachments. In pop mail, when someone says "did you get that article I sent," you have no idea where to find it. With gmail, it is right there.
In terms of managing the interface, you don't delete email. You "archive" it. The archive is always available through a quick search: name, text, address, anything. It comes right up. Yes, you can tag your emails with a label for even more instant recall but this is not necessary since the search is infallible.
What about the problem of a new email address? The answer is that you don't have to use it. You can add your old accounts to gmail and forward the mail from your provider to your new address. Then you can send and receive from your old address. No one will ever know the difference. But you will have control over your life again.
And spam? The New York Times ran a story the other day about some guy who is inventing the ultimate spam solution, but as I read, I thought this is sheer nonsense. Gmail has already solved the problem, or at least reduced it to the point that it is not a noticeable problem at all.
What about your contact list, which you have worked years to cumulate? Go to your old pop client, export the addresses in a CSV format, and then import them to gmail. You are done. You whole life has transferred over.
What about that huge stack of unanswered emails? Forward them to your new gmail address and deal with them that way. You might take an afternoon to put all this together, but the time savings arrive almost immediately. Your email is the same wherever your are: home, work, travelling or wherever. It only takes you a moment to check it. You are in or you are out.
Anyone can get a gmail address. They are free.
You can also get a mises.com address – which is beautiful and wonderful in every way. You only need to sign up at the Austrian Network and post on the forum. You are then entitled to Mises.com email address. Again, it uses gmail as its interface so you get all the above features plus you have the high status that comes with using a Mises.com address if you so choose.
I know that many people are reading this thinking: I can't stand any more change in my life. I've had it with new gizmos. The last thing I want is to deal with email. I hate email!
But listen: the reason you hate email is that your inbox is out of control. This is hugely significant these days; it means your life is out of control, and you know that if you think about it.
So hate innovation and email and computers all you want but make the switch from pop mail to gmail. It will be the switch that will put your life back together. You can then repair friendships, shape up at the office, and end the depression.
Your choice about how you manage email is not longer a choice over trivial gizmos. It is a choice about the whole of how you manage life itself. More hangs in the balance than you know. Make the switch and start your life anew.
Comments (19)
"The symptoms include feeling overwhelmed and behind the times. Friends and family offended by one person's unresponsiveness. Tasks are dropped or not completed. Seething anger is brewing over your or someone's irresponsibility. You or someone you know is developing a reputation for uncharacteristic flakiness or a tendency to forget. You or someone you know doesn't do what he says he will do..."
"...The results are broken friendships, unraveled professional lives, and personal depression. The devil may care, you say. But it's not the devil that's the problem. It's the people you love and love you who are resenting you and thinking that your life is falling apart.
I understand the value of being able to organize one's e-mails; but I also believe that there is another reason for the kinds of issues you mentioned.
Let's take things back 50 years, when people were actually part of their community. Friends and relatives lived in close proximity to each other. They saw the same people every week, every few days, or even every day. In other words, people felt connected to one another.
Greeting cards and letters were exchanged, but they were generally not used as a substitute for personal contact.
People may think that e-mail and text messaging may be the greatest things since sliced bread; but IMHO, they don't even begin to substitute for personal contact. Words hastily written can frequently lead to misunderstandings, because they lack the inflection one would normally hear in the spoken word. And when disagreements occur, it's a little too easy to [delete] the friendship.
Not too long ago, I called a friend who lives about 50 miles away. She asked me if I'd read her e-mail. I mentioned that I hadn't gone through my e-mails for the day. She brought me up short, told me to go read her e-mail and then call her back. It turned out to be something that would have taken two minutes to discuss. The ironic part is that this person complains about people being unwilling to get together.
I think e-mails make relationships more impersonal. Bloggers are nastier than they'd normally be because of their anonymity.
I don't care how organized you make your e-mails...it doesn't make up for personal contact or telephone conversations.
Published: December 5, 2007 1:46 PM
Jeffrey,
You should clarify that Mises doesn't just run a gmail-style interface; it runs the gmail program itself, because google hosts the Mises email system with its hosted gmail program. Don't want anyone thinking, "Oh, they have something that's like gmail; probably a cheap knockoff and doesn't do as well."
Published: December 5, 2007 2:02 PM
You're really behind the times. I just read an article that said some businesses are having problems because the late 20's and 30 somethings use email, but the newest entries into the workforce don't even use email, preferring IM.
Published: December 5, 2007 2:42 PM
So true on email. but the point is that many people are still stuck with pop and this is a terrible mess.
Published: December 5, 2007 3:04 PM
IMHO said:
> Friends and relatives lived in
> close proximity to each other.
> They saw the same people every week,
> every few days, or even every day.
Except the ones who didn't. People have been chasing economic opportunity for centuries -- especially in America. "Go West, young man...". How did those families stay in touch? With letters. Email is a godsend compared to waiting months to hear back from your family.
> I think e-mails make relationships
> more impersonal.
How can that possibly be true? Email hasn't taken away any choices, only given you a new one. Only curmudgeons make the silly argument that email is a "substitute" for other forms of interaction. It's not a substitute, it's a complement.
Published: December 5, 2007 3:29 PM
Jeff,
Help me out.
I have all these symptoms, but have been using gmail now for 2 years.
In fact, I've been using web-based mail since 1996. I even still have that account in good working order. In fact, I've had some kind of server-based email going back to 1993.
I don't think gmail alone is the solution.
In 1990, Don Knuth announced to a stunned geek community, "I've used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime." He has successfully lived since then with no email.
See the article here: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
It's been years since I first read that, and it's bothered me ever since. Next year marks 15 years of email for me. And I get Don's point, in spades, doubled and redoubled. But I don't have the luxury of being a famous ubergeek nearing retirement, where people expect me to churn out the most slowly written books on earth.
I'm 30 years old and in a fast-paced, highly technical profession. And often I feel like I never want to receive another email as long as I live. Ditto on the IM, which has featured large in my life now for almost 8 years.
So what to do? Shall I move to Montana and become a dental floss farmer? Or is there a better way to manage sanity than just to use gmail?
Published: December 5, 2007 3:50 PM
Instead of POP, try IMAP with a good mail client. Webmail is okay, but IMAP gives you the best of both worlds - email that can be sorted any way you want, and yet have a copy on your local machine to look at even if you can't get on the internet. (Airplanes for one)
Oh, and learn to hit delete. You don't need a copy of every email you ever sent, if only because what you have deleted cannot be brought against you in court, while what you have not deleted is subject to court orders.
Published: December 5, 2007 6:27 PM
Henry,
Hitting delete probably doesn't matter, since your ISP is undoubtedly keeping archives of all the email you ever sent.
Published: December 5, 2007 6:38 PM
Hmmm... My first email might as well have been webmail, it was on Compu$erve in 1982 or 83. Then at work in 1988, and every job since. I set up my first smtp system on Linux in 1995 as an honest to Cromm Internet server with my personal domain where it ran for 8 years.
Then in 2003 some thrice darned spammer used my domain for his fake "From", the combination of infinite bounce messages and many titanic mail bombs from irate users finally overloaded the spool which had been set up without defensive filters in a simpler, more innocent time.
Yet my email (Kmail) client remains local to my machine, encryption and authentication enabled, Gmail is the POP server now. I'm happy to let Gmail filters handle the majority of spam, I'm happy to use the Gmail web interface when the need arises.
With that much history, what I can say is that disorganization will occur regardless of interface. Each allows categorization, threading, keep-or-delete. Archive or leave it in the in-box, it's the individual and their discipline which determines the results, not the mail interface.
Some clients enable some features better than others, like Kmail and PGP encryption/authentication, but what you wish to do can be done, somehow, with any email client even if what you have to resort to is copy/paste.
I like keeping my email local, keeping the Gmail web interface as a backup. Truly, for me, the best solution so far.
P.S.: Don't tug on Superman's cape, don't spit into the wind. Don't pull the mask off the Lone Ranger and don't use Outlook or Outlook Express. Ever.
Published: December 5, 2007 7:49 PM
I don't really see a proper case as to why web-based email is better at all in the article. I've had a mail client since about 1994, and it works great, is super fast (since all the email is already downloaded), has all the attachments already on my computer, and allows me to wizz through junk mail folders and inbox and delete, flag and read emails quicker than a web-based interface that has to talk to a server that may be on the other side of the world.
Since my email is downloaded every five minutes, I pick through it throughout the day, rather than having a big job as I might if more seldomly log into a web-based system.
I'm sure there's a lot of stress related reasons why people haven't managed their email, and my guess would be that most of it has to do with prioritizing, but I fail to understand how moving to gmail will make any difference.
If you only had internet access and/or pop mail access at work, getting a gmail account isn't going to make anything easier.
I have 10 years of email in my mail client, I move things older that a year or so into a new mailbox. That way I can search more current things easy, or do a brute search of all my mailboxes for older stuff.
Reading between the lines the article is talking about the difficuly of only being able to reply to emails at work or at home.
POP-mail can keep mail on the server, but doesn't handle syncronising what's read or outgoing mail, so I must agree that web or at least IMAP is better if you don't have a laptop or work from home, yet have time and want to deal with emails in multiple places. Most people can't just set up a client at work to show their private emails, and web mail would be better for them.
If you have a laptop, deal with large attachments and lots of emails, and aren't stessed out or so novice so you can't set up som extra mailboxes, I'd say nothing beats a client based email system with intant access to all new emails, and attachments, without the soul-sucking lag all web-based user interfaces inevitably require to display and edit emails, and download attachments.
Published: December 5, 2007 8:01 PM
Jaq, if youre going to be a dental floss farmer in Montana are you going ride a pygmy pony across the boredom?
Published: December 5, 2007 10:11 PM
Yes indeed, with my tweezers gleamin' in the moonlighty night!
As a career choice, it has its attractions...
On a more serious note to that, I think more of what the problem is is more akin to RSI for the brain. Peter Drucker's age of the knowledge worker has come to full fruition, and quite recently. Knowledge workers have far more ambiguity, less of a focused target, far more decision points, and more barriers to communicating tight nuances that we haven't really been trained for, than blue collar workers did not so long ago. How many people can be considered blue collar versus even two and a half decades ago?
Email might just be one symptom of this. Every single email represents multiple decision points... Do I open it? Do I delete it? Is there something actionable I need to deal with, reactively? Proactively? How do I phrase my response? What style and tone are appropriate to the audience? Who else needs this communique? How do I file this? How long do I need to wait for a response, and how do I remind myself that this is a pending issue three weeks from now?
... And you need to do this for every email that crosses your inbox. This gets problematic when you get an email on average every 5 minutes at work, and then you go home and face a backlog of personal email.
No wonder I cringe whenever I cringe whenever a new "you've got mail" alert pops up. And now that I have email coming in on my blackberry, the only time I'm ever truly free from email is when fully immersed in water. You can't call it a "rest room" any longer...
In the nineteenth century, it was quite some time before anyone identified RSI as an occupational hazard of typewriters. I wonder if there's such a concept that will emerge for mental, knowledge work. Rapid Decisionmaking Injury Syndrome?
Published: December 6, 2007 12:15 AM
Tried Gmail, hated it. I prefer Yahoo.
For more serious stuff I would not dream of using a mises.org address.
Published: December 6, 2007 4:06 AM
How much spam is out there?
The following extract is from a recent corporate firewall statistics report from a major company. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Total Attempted Messages 347,000,000
Stopped by Reputation Filtering 96.05 333,300,000
Invalid Recipients 0.03 87,300
Spam Messages Detected 1.87 6,500,000
Total Threat Messages 97.95 339,887,300
Clean Messages Accepted 2.05 7,112,700
"With just under three hundred and fifty million attempted incoming messages in the past month - [deletedXYX] IP Reputation Filtering is doing the biggest job of cutting out the junk (based on the reputation of the sender IP) with over 96% of all attempted messages being blocked at the connection level. After this there is just under 2% of mail being blocked by the content inspection based [deletedXYX] Anti Spam for a total of just under 98% of all attempted incoming email being blocked by our external gateways - leading to just over 2% (seven point one million) attempted messages being accepted and delivered to our users."
Ouch! I used to believe in Sturgeon's Law i.e. that "Ninety percent of everything is crap." Sturgeon was an optimist!
Published: December 6, 2007 6:44 AM
I've used webmail for years, but I also use Outlook to manage multiple webmail accounts. My main webmail account is Yahoo's pay service and it's been wonderful. It even integrates real time chat.
Published: December 6, 2007 9:03 PM
If it's gmail in disguise, stay far away.
Published: December 8, 2007 12:36 AM
I also have email addresses to give out @RonPaulChicago.com for anyone who would want to be connected with that domain. Request one from 'john' @ that domain if you want one. (Tell me what you have to do with Ron Paul and Chicago if you aren't someone I recognize.) These are run by Google's Gmail service as Mises.com emails are.
Someone above mentioned IM. One nice feature about Gmail is that it integrates IM so nicely with the email account. IM chats are saved along with emails. Apparently Gmail is now integrating AIM with its service. I haven't tried any of my AIM accounts on it yet. I have been using Pidgin for AIM, MSN and Yahoo IM.
Published: December 8, 2007 1:51 AM
Hi all,
I have been using POP email accounts on an almost daily basis since 1991. Before that I used UNIX mail on a terminal based UNIX mainframe.
I have around 10 years of email sitting on my laptop running Eudora 5.1.
Mail older than 1998 is sitting on a UNIX server in my data cabinet, searchable if I need to know what I wrote to my clients and geek friends as far back as 1991.
I was running Eudora 7.0.1 but I have deliberately returned to an older, faster, more stable version, as the additional features of 7 are not critical to me and in fact are more annoyance than boon. The biggest reason for reverting to 5.1 was speed of searching through my local mail files (folders in Outlook speak), currently 1929 of them.
I POP from 7 high volume accounts, 3 low volume accounts and run IMAP for 2 corporate accounts where I have commercial documentation management responsibilities beyond my own business and personal requirements.
What has been described in the posting are definitely real problems confronting people who spend a significant amount of time using email.
I have found in my case that these problems are primarily behaviourally based rather than technology based. They can therefore be managed and even overcome by careful management of my time and other people's expectations of me.
Reading David Allen's Getting Things Done and implementing parts of his systems that suit my way of thinking has been of great benefit to me in managing my email load.
Of course if I were running Outlook or Outlook Express then I would have a whole raft of technology problems on top of the behavioural ones.
My Eudora configuration has over 800 filters defined that filter messages into individual mail boxes based on person, company, newsletter subscription or keywords.
The running incoming mail filtering report that Eudora provides is my dashboard / control panel for monitoring what correspondence I need to note and act upon or what is simply there for reference.
I archive all attachments above 3MB onto a desktop system on my network, to conserve disk space on the laptop.
These days I run Google Desktop on my systems to augment Eudora's mail file based search capabilities, because it can rapidly search inside all of the tens of thousands of Word and PDF attachments I have as well.
I also have two primary Gmail accounts for two different identities that I manage online, entirely separately from all my local mail.
And a Yahoo account that is still accumulating various alerts, that I no longer actively monitor. I just trust that information is there if and when I ever need to search it.
A word of caution if you are a pure Gmail user. Read Google's terms and conditions. According to those T&C's they literally own the rights to everything in your mail box and they can take it all away without notice at the click of a button.
There's a story circulating, possibly apocryphal, of an Internet marketer who ran his entire business from his Gmail account, including access to all of his funds and money transfer authentication systems.
He woke up one morning to find his account no longer working. Google had frozen it and refused to even offer an explanation as to why.
The story I heard was that he lost access to his entire Internet marketing business, impacting severely on all his revenue streams and was left to slowly battle Google via legal action to get access to his account.
One of anything is a potentially fatal scenario.
Always use POP to back up ALL of your Gmail or other web hosted email if you value it and require access to it in the event of Google excommunication.
I've experienced the pain of this in a small way myself. I had a Google AdWords account that was locked without explanation, losing me access to my own AdWords campaign and a client campaign as well.
As it was only a couple of campaigns that I quickly replicated from saved keyword lists and printed documentation, I am not too bent out of shape by this.
The same thing happened with an old Blogger.com account I had, and an AdSense account I set up for that account. To the best of my knowledge, I did nothing to breach Google's T&Cs.
To date, after more than 12 months, none of my correspondence to Google on these matters has been answered.
Just know that if you depend entirely on Gmail, you are totally vulnerable to the whim of some account manager in Google who might have crashed their car on the way to work, or fought with their spouse, and on that day, you write something they don't like much, ka-pow you are virtually exiled to outer Cyberia and have to walk 10,000 cyber-miles back into the warm sunshine of Emailville.
happy regards,
Bradley C Hughes
Published: December 8, 2007 7:23 PM
Hi again,
Apologies to all for the dorky double-spacing in my previous posting. When I previewed and saw everything all run together with no line breaks, I cleverly second-guessed the system incorrectly and manually inserted
to make sure I would have blank lines between my paragraphs.D'uh!
Oh and let me just say that I am not suggesting that any real account managers at Google would ever crash their car or fight with their spouses, let alone take it out on a client. That is certainly not the sort of conduct that Google account managers would engage in and I wrote it only as a hypothetical illustration of the dangers of having one of anything with no back-ups.
I love Google, I use just about everything Google just about every day and I think they are all a fantastic bunch of people, who are obviously suffering from this same challenges we are discussing here, hence they just haven't got through their in boxes to my emails yet.
Google workers, you have my empathy and support!
happy regards,
Bradley C Hughes
Published: December 8, 2007 7:34 PM