Is Email = Efail?

Is this just a long winded way of Jeff apologizing for being overloaded and giving himself a get out of jail free card?

He included the simple truth "humans don't scale". Surely that's the end of it.

Email or anything else isn't going to solve the problem that a single human only has a finite amount of attention to give things.

I think email "works" for 99.99% of the people, who get reasonable number of emails from family, friends and collagues. I don't personally know anybody who is having these problems.

There are a few personalities like J. Atwood and M. Arrington, who are in the fortunate situation that everybody wants to talk to them, but email works for everybody else. Also, it seems to me that if everybody would call them, or text them, or IM them (as is suggested in the article) it'd be even worse.

If I'd be in their place I'd just set up an auto-reply that says "Sorry, I'm overloaded, I may be unable to reply to your message."

I do agree that it's an interesting question how their Inbox could auto-prioratize their messages so they can respond to the most urgent ones. But 99.99% of people have no need for this feature. (Being subscribed to tons of mailing lists doesn't count, those are easy to sort out.)

What scares me is that I have given up on the spam problem months ago and now just rely on the Thunderbird spam filter. So email is no longer a reliable way to contact me, because of the danger of false positives. Meanwhile, the junk mail folder contains thousands of emails, so there is no chance for sifting through it by hand.

While it's difficult to keep up with a steady stream of lengthy emails, I prefer that to phone calls. Especially when working with customers who tend to ask the same question multiple times. I'd rather send an email and attach the same file/text again and again than deal with the overhead of multiple phone calls.

If someone sends you a long email trash it or call them once. I find I can process around 300 emails an hour if I just trash most of the unimportant ones. The secret is the one line response. Yes, No, Sorry I don't have the time etc. The older an email the more willing I am to just dump it into the trash.

Can somebody explain to me why email is so difficult to handle? I have four open accounts and get regular email for school and personal business, and I get the occasional set of messages about blogs, along with spam, and it still takes me at most fifteen minutes to sort out.

I wish email had a 140 character limit like twitter. Or that it allowed nothing but subject line.

I'm about 3000 messages behind on my email. This article struck a nerve...

So IM is better? 3000 messages in my inbox that I can attend to when I'm ready vs. IM - where I'm dealing with everybody simultaneously and live? That's worse than the telephone, IMHO.

Anyway, if you get the same query more than once, it is time to put the answer into a wiki or blog.