Ask HN: What kind of emails are you getting? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What kind of emails are you getting?

I consistently see colleagues email inboxes overflowing with thousands of unread messages. I hear people saying they get 100s of non-spam emails a day.

I've been in all kinds of organizations, from big to small, Military, Academic and Corporate. I've been a CEO of a VC backed startup with dozens of employees and corporate customers. I just don't get 100s of non-spam emails a day.

So for those of you that do get 100s of non-spam emails, what are all of these messages? Are most of them just cc'ing you?

I'm baffled at the concept of getting that many non-spam emails. What are all of these messages?

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I'm not sure I'm in your target audience--I guess it depends on where you set your bar for "spam".

5 of my last 100 emails got red, and the rest I don't intend to read. The unread bunch falls into these categories:

- Notifications of activity in Jira or Confluence (I go to the apps directly, so I don't need email notifications)

- Mass communications from HR, marketing, the CEO or some other entity that is too-many-hops away from my team to ever have anything relevant to my job.

- Meeting invites to meetings I attended anyway due to a conversation I had prior

- Servers letting me know about errors that I already expected due to conversations I had prior

- People telling me that some server I don't care about is down or up (presumably to stop inbound complaints)

- IT related communications (ex: new wifi password) from our parent company that aren't related to our site

About a year back I abandoned e-mail and only check it if somebody mentions something. So far I haven't missed it. Same thing with news. For both of these things I find that my meatspace social network already contains what I need (we also use slack pretty heavily, so the real work related communications happen there).

Yeah, maybe I'm out of the loop on some things, but it's hard to get work done in the loop.

Thanks! Interestingly it seems like all of these are notifications that don't require any action whatsoever.

Agreed. Be aware that there could be some bias here... everybody knows how frequently I check my mail, so if they have something that requires action, they'd have found a better medium to ask me.

Except this one guy, but I'm sure if I keep it up I'll have him trained to use slack also.

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