Sterling Hughes: The end of email

Sterling Hughes is “phasing out email”:http://www.edwardbear.org/blog/archives/000238.html.

I wish him well in his endevour. I’ve signed off many of my mailing lists, but it still takes ~ half an hour a day just to communicate with clients via email.

But I don’t think that email is a terrible form of communication. No doubt uber-geeks would like to improve the protocols used, but for me they work well.

There are two problems with email:

# The tools we use can’t cope with the way email is used today.
# We don’t treat it right.

Point one has been “touched on”:http://peter.mapledesign.co.uk/weblog/archives/most_email_clients_are_obsolete.html before in this weblog, so I’ll only expand on point two.

Email is _not a discussion format_. It was designed to enable the exchange of information. I prefer to see email as an instant postal service, rather than a textual-chat format. So in general as much thought should go into writing an email as into writing a letter. I think the problem with email is that it’s too easy to send a message, so there’s no barrier to make you stop and think if a message is necessary.

Would I want to be without email? No. I find it very useful to converse with people. I’m getting better at managing the email I receive, and usually don’t get round to writing replies to messages I receive, which cuts down on the time required
Can it be improved on? Definitely. But until something better comes along, I’ll keep on using it.