Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013 | Hacker News Reader

Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

37 pointsnickbilton43 comments

Disruptions: In a world where we send 67 trillion emails a year, I started 2014 declaring "Email Bankruptcy."

This title reminds me of the line, "Nobody goes to that bar. It's too crowded."[0].

I'm not sure why people love to insist that "email is broken" Email does its job remarkably well. In 2014, it's one of the only communication forms that's truly open, 100% cross-platform, and free-as-in-both-beer-and-freedom. If there's something more you need, it's easy to write (or extend) a client that handles your email according to whatever logic you set up.

The main complaint that I hear about email is that "we get too much of it". But that has little to do with email itself, and more to do with how much we do these days. The pace of business in 2014 is faster than the pace of business in 1964, and I'd wager that if you compared the volume of email today with the volume of paper mail then, the increased velocity of transactions would account for almost all of the difference.

Rather than trying to "fix" email by replacing it or extending the protocols in incompatible ways, let's work on creating clients that do what we want them to do.

[0] Currently the title is "Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013", though I suspect that this may be reverted soon, given the HN policy.

In the set of options to choose when one hasn't a truly innovative notion to review then the one that tends to top the list is: "If there's a separable technology which hasn't shown significant public change in ten years then you may declare it as _dead_, or otherwise broken or moribund"

Selecting this option has the advantage that the majority of readers might see a point and no further research into this issue need be done by the commentator.

Furthermore, the following technologies are thus "dead": (1) the desktop (2) email (3) Apple (4) linux (5) the-internet (6) the classroom (7) physical books (8) sharks ... you get the idea.

> If there's something more you need, it's easy to write (or extend) a client that handles your email according to whatever logic you set up.

This part is not true, it's incredibly hard to write an email client.

I think he meant handling the client's logic and configuration (how it processes messages), rather than writing one from scratch.

Which is not that difficult, what with things like Sieve scripting.

> I'd wager that if you compared the volume of email today with the volume of paper mail then, the increased velocity of transactions would account for almost all of the difference.

Doubtful, and methinks the article nails precisely why it's not the case. Back then, workers didn't cc their every move to their boss and colleagues, whereas nowadays doing so often is the norm. Be it FYI or CYA, the cc is used and abused. Reporting and RFC channels from the past have been replaced by live -- and overwhelming -- data streams of information.

In your analogy, does going to a bar correspond to sending or receiving email? Because, "Nobody reads email anymore; they receive too much of it" doesn't have any paradoxical self-contradictions.

For paradoxical effect, try: "Nobody sends e-mail anymore. There's just too much of it."

By the way, the original quote was from Yogi Berra: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

"the increased velocity of transactions would account for almost all of the difference."

Don't forget the reduced cost of CYA. One reason I have 2208 emails in my deleted folder right now is a server I don't care about in a state I don't work in which provides a service I don't care about is down, so hundreds, perhaps thousands are being spammed. But we can't limit that because "what if you needed that info" or "one time someone didn't get an important notice and ..."

I get around an email per minute and its my fault if I don't read an important one. Almost all, of course, are unimportant.

Email is just fine. It lets you address things as you like, puts no time pressure on you, and gives you a written record of your discussions. It's also low-overhead and universal.

Don't blame email, if you can't create a few simple inbox filters to manage the cruft for you. It has been many years since people actually suffered from the weight of zillions of spam messages in their inbox. We've largely addressed the spam thing. The non-spam stuff is going to be dumped on you, whether it's in email or phone calls or text messages or instant messages or facebook messages or instagram messages or whatever the fuck it is teenagers are doing these days that makes email "irrelevant".

>It has been many years since people actually suffered from the weight of zillions of spam messages in their inbox.

And this is part of what makes email close to useless these days. Outside of your own organization you have no idea if your mail was delivered or black holed at a server somewhere never to be heard from again. Too many servers still do the wrong thing, accept and delete, rather than reject at HELO.

You wouldn't care much if the post office dropped all the ads for $5.99 pizza before they got to your post box, but if your bills got lost regularly you would be unhappy, and that's the problem with email.

>And this is part of what makes email close to useless these days. Outside of your own organization you have no idea if your mail was delivered or black holed at a server somewhere never to be heard from again.

I work in the domain of email and I'm not really sure how you came to this conclusion. I work on an internal team at a fairly well known e-commerce site and because of a few simple metrics, we have very high confidence in our mail being delivered. Not only marketing newsletters but also transactional emails like receipts and shipping notifications.

I'll second that. I've been using e-mail since the 1980s and have never had a problem with receiving a legitimate e-mail. Banks and other businesses always tell you to add their notification addresses to your contact list to avoid their messages being marked as spam, but I've never found this to be necessary.

Speaking for myself, you've got reliable delivery for the kinds of emails that matter least to users. I really don't care to receive most "transactional" emails and I definitely don't care about newsletters. Meanwhile, my experience with gmail is that I sometimes miss individual emails from human beings because they got caught in the spam filter. This state of affairs doesn't make email useless, but the system does seem to favor sophisticated bulk senders with tons of resources to devote to the problem over real people just trying to communicate something important.

I think this article is conflating a couple of very different things.

* How much email is sent worldwide.

* How email is used in the workplace and the negative impacts of it.

* Ways to manage email in general and alternatives to email for personal (non-workplace) communication.

These are very different topics that can roughly be divided into workplace and personal spaces.

* Yes, there's a lot of email being sent. It should be pretty obvious why as it's ubiquitous, easy, simple and reliable. Nothing wrong with that.

* Workplace email is a completely different beast. I ran some fairly large internal mail systems for many years. Workplace email isn't about communicating nearly as much as it's "The Record".

A place to record, prove, ass-cover, expose and obtain implied consent in a way that is discoverable as evidence down the road.

The creation of anxiety and lost productivity here due to sheer volume and massive CC/BCC escalation is obvious - a significant part of many modern jobs is active defense of your own borders in a huge distributed audit trail.

* Inbox managers are nice, but they generally don't apply to the workplace, just as Twitter doesn't.

>"Email is probably most invasive form of communication yet devised"

Oh, I find unscheduled phone calls much more invasive. They require that I make myself available at that moment, and if I'm not in an immediate position to talk, then I need to similarly inconvenience the caller when I return the call.

Yeah, the writer of that statement hasn't done years of on call work. If there is any form of communication more invasive than your third phone call after midnight (and before 6am) after weeks or months of the same, I'd be surprised. Instantly awake, instantly angry. Have a civil conversation, hang up the phone and swear as you get dressed, drive in to work swearing, swear as you work, drive home, swear into bed, rinse and repeat. And if one of the calls is poorly worded or a mistake (>>oh good, you're awake<< or >>I was after the house surgeon, not you<<), the instant ability to conjure up new sarcastic comments was amazing. I quit and became mostly human again.

I find it odd that his solution to the 'invasive' nature of email revolves around social media, a medium whose entire purpose for being is farming your content and selling your data.

No thank you.

A link that will let you actually read the story: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

> Mr. Thompson said that in the workplace, email had become a major barrier of efficiency. “People feel the need to include 10 other people on an email just to let them know they are being productive at work,” he said. “But as a result, it ends up making those other 10 people unproductive because they have to manage that email.”

The solution to that is not to fix email, or to fix the secretarial pool where memos used to be typed up with Cc lists, or to fix instant messaging or whatever's next. The solution to that problem is to fix that problem, that people feel insecure enough in their jobs (for lots of reasons) that they must waste other people's time to help them declare "I am valuable."

One thing stood out to me in the article "make something free and easy and people will do a lot of it".

What about this as a potential solution - in order to send an email to someone, you have to pay something.

Here's how it could work:

1) You sign up for a service that autoresponds to all incoming email stating that in order to send this receiver an email, they require at least X BTC.

2) The receivers inbox only shows email where the sender attached the minimum X BTC. In fact the inbox is sorted by the amount of BTC attached to each email.

3) The receiver keeps half the attached BTC and the email service keeps the other half. This is the part I'm least sure about.

Thoughts?

Already been tried. It's called hashcash: http://www.hashcash.org/

Coincidentally, hashcash's proof of work is the foundation of bitcoin.

But don't let this discourage you from trying your idea. I think it's still a fantastic idea. Making email cost something to send (either btc or CPU time like hashcash) would kill spam, and slow down the flow of over-communication.

The merits of charging CPU time are arguable, but adding monetary costs to sending email is absolutely immoral. Especially something like Bitcoin, which has a steep learning curve.

Unless your goal is to transform email into a system more closely resembling snail mail, but for cipherpunks.

You just complicated email by adding money and monetary transactions to it. This approach would also do a horrible disservice to the roughly 6.7+ billion people with not much money; it assumes someone's communications are to be judged primarily by how much money they have or whether they have bitcoins, rather than the value of what they have to say. Making communication over the Internet more expensive (when the opposite should occur), breaks the Internet and drastically devalues one of the things it's best at and was designed for.

It would be like charging every visitor to your web site, to deal with scrappers, form spammers or dos attacks.

There are already excellent solutions to every possible scenario the money approach would supposedly solve.

Attaching BTC to an email is akin to the sender attaching an "importance" score to the email - with the benefit that the sender doesn't like as much because it costs them money.

The receiver can still setup rules - i.e. if the sender is in my family or team at work, don't require the BTC attachment. You could set it up so that it was only for strangers emailing you. Your spam filter would still be in place.

Its a way to pay to get a quicker response or more attention - kind of like advertising.

I had this exact same idea about a week ago! You can create a forwarding email address that has a payment barrier to sent emails through.

Regarding point number 3, I think the service should charge a small fixed fee for each accepted email not some percent. This would enable users to create services based upon email alone. You could charge people for support or consulting with your entire operation occurring over email.

You would need a way for me to whitelist or discount senders.

I don't want my wife to have to pay to send me an email.

I don't want personal contacts to have to pay.

I don't want people offering me (good) jobs to have to pay.

You have to figure out a way to solve these problems without me having to review each email to determine how much it should cost.

Why do we still have forced ordering by arrival time?

When I sort my physical mail, I put it into piles and order those piles by importance. When I sort my email, I can't.

In my physical mail I can choose the importance order and ad to the queues as I wish. With email, not so much.

I want a gmail plugin that lets me order my inbox in order of priority.

> When I sort my physical mail, I put it into piles and order those piles by importance. When I sort my email, I can't.

That's almost entirely a comment on how lousy the state of modern email clients is.

Outlook has let you do this for years, you can set various flags on mail items, you can also do this for mail you send so that it will automatically flag for the recipient.

The problem of course is that if you allow the sender to specify the importance of an email they will flag things that are important to them,not necessarily important to you.

Fortunately, Outlook also allows you to set up processing rules that reset the priority of an incoming e-mail. No need to let senders specify priority for you.

gmail looks like to be on this path already except instead of allowing you to queue messages its trying algos to manage it for you. (Priority inbox / email tabs)

Gmail has a feature called priority inbox -- it does almost exactly what you want. Within the priority section it is still sorted by time, not by priority.

I've always wanted an inbox that sorted purely on priority.

Unfortunately, gmail marks everything (well, 99%) as "priority" despite my training it for many months.

Interesting. It's actually almost flawless for me. Have you done bulk training? Do searches for groups of messages you know are and are not priority and mark them in bulk. This seems to have helped me immensely.

I have, it doesn't seem to help much if at all. I'm not entirely sad, I already tag my emails by contact group and what vhost/catchall they show up at.

Strangely, it works fine in my non-GApps email.

I'm curious as to why so many people end up in the email hell, I can understand if you are a senior person at a large company or some sort of public figure/minor celebrity.

I just run a decent spam filter and ruthlessly unsubscribe from all commercial newsletters. Things from mailing lists are auto-filtered into folders and almost everything that's left is stuff that is pertinent to projects I am involved with so it's stuff I need to read. On a busy day when I'm working on 2 or 3 projects I might get 20 emails.

TLDR; This article has no content. It just spews statistics about Email, yet gives only one, non-thought-out, solution to dealing with lots of email.

Its just a sensational title, move on.

I hear this every now and then from "the experts", but I am not sure if it is broken in the first place. Email with a nice client is very efficient and effective, it will not be beaten in the near future. What do we replace it with? IM, skype, google hangout? Nope

The author includes the following quote, with which he apparently agrees:

“If email was invented today, it probably would not have survived as a technology,” Mr. Suarez said. “Social and public sites are much more efficient.”

That doesn't seem remotely plausible to me. If a company wants to send a message to a customer, a supplier or its lawyer, they're not going to do it on Facebook (with its dubious privacy policies) or post it on Twitter (for everyone in the world to read). And a sender can't rely on a recipient even having a social media account on the platform they use. E-mail, like the telephone, is both more universal and more private.

Also, in industries like investing or software development, where communications need to be archived so that they're available for legal discovery (e.g., SEC enforcement actions, or establishing prior art for patent litigation), your company needs to have control over its own e-mail. Saying "We can't respond to your subpoena because Facebook deleted our trader's account for breach of its terms of service" won't make government regulators very happy.

Finally, you might be able to declare "e-mail bankruptcy" in your personal life, but if you work in the business world, you can't just throw away all your e-mails after you return from vacation (unless, maybe you're the CEO of a company). You co-workers and customers aren't going to appreciate your dropping the ball on important issues. One solution would be to set up e-mail filters so that e-mails can be categorized by priority and the urgent ones replied to. For example, if you're a blogger for the NY Times, comments from your readers shouldn't even be going to the same e-mail address as messages from editors or news sources.

Nice title.

"Email is broken. People are using it a lot."

I'm deeply sorry, but the entire article is just a rant about personal frustrations, and some figures thrown around. Nothing valid or worthy of reading. Blogging at its finest.

First of all the term "email" refers to a technology, a means to deliver messages. All of this is _brilliantly_ standardized by RFCs, which in my opinion make it the most viable technical solution to open, free and reliable messaging in the world. Yes, things can be improved - as always - but email is and will be here for the long run.

What the author is actually frustrated about is the services he's using; e-mail clients to be more specific. There are many ways to configure an email server and client to filter out spam, unsolicited email and how to manage the entire pool of emails received, by filtering and organizing.

If your Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo or whatever-client you're using doesn't do its job properly, maybe try something else instead of blaming "email".

Email is not invasive at all. The clients (email software) can be invasive - alerts, popups and all that - and the habits of an email user/consumer can lead to messages being invasive. And on the above, if you're using free Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or such, what do you expect? If you keep subscribing online to all sorts of promotions, contents and newsletters, in the hope to get rich overnight, what do you expect? Maybe next time when you sign-up for some free service, you actually pay attention to those checkboxes that say "Yes, subscribe me to this useless newsletters", before blaming "email".

I personally use email as my primary means of communication, especially when it comes to business and on-the-record messages, but also personal when I don't feel like having my privacy poked around by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other commercial services. It's not as fast as chat, but it's more reliable and gives the other party the chance to reply when they finish their more important business if any.

If you declare email bankruptcy, that just means you failed at managing your communications behavior; which is a constant process, not a one-off. Too many people expect email (and many services) to simply adjust to their personal needs, without their smallest effort/input. There is no one size fits all, not even on the internet.

And without email, we'd still be at the FAX stage.

> When messages pile up, select all, hit delete, and declare email bankruptcy.

> Email: bilton@nytimes.com. Twitter: @nickbilton

Kind of ironic

Email must be looked at as a "stream of information". No longer are you required to read, respond, or organize everything.

The best thing is to archive everything once per week and forget about all the unread emails. If it's really important, the sender will be in touch again.

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