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Comment by michael_dorfman | Hacker News Reader

Because e-mail doesn't come with a filter that only brings urgent things to your attention.

Gmail has been doing a pretty good job. But fair enough, it's something that still requires a human touch.

But he's still reading e-mail - just not on a monitor. And I'd wager he's still replying to it - though perhaps he has her type it up.

He replies by handwritten notes on the printed email. These are sent by snail mail to the recipient.

And he's using email to about the same extent that a telegraph is a telephone. (With a telegraph, you speak your message out loud, and then the message is sent via a wire to a recipient, so it is just the same as a telephone, right?)

Ah, I didn't realize the responses were sent via snailmail.

You can configure your email client to alert you to emails marked as urgent, but in my experience that includes every and only email from HR.

Do sane email clients (like mutt) even have urgency levels?

I think he just means that "Urgent" is in the subject.

OK. But I suspect HR everywhere will use Outlook.

Well then you have the basis of a perfect system: configure your email client to only alert you of emails not marked urgent.

As a student, this also comes from the department. It is apparently urgent and important that there is a talk in three weeks time which is optional!

True, but I've written enough of those for Gmail that almost every single email gets categorized automatically, so I know exactly which ones are important and which ones are not.

The tiny minority of new, unfiltered emails that ever actually hit my inbox are usually interesting. And they end up having filters written for them if they're going to reoccur.

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