Anyone who tells me that e-mail is a rock solid option for communication should be smacked upside the head with a bundle of the latest catalogs and other "junk" delivered by the U.S. Postal Service. Businesses need to re-examine their relationships with e-mail and "snail mail." E-mail may be faster and more convenient, but it doesn't have the reliability of a phone call or paper mail – and please don't try to tell me otherwise.
Email's downward fall is due to its cost and convenience. For fractions of a penny, you can send an e-mail to hundreds of your friends and they can send you back messages ranging from urgent to boring with the same casual ease from a smartphone, tablet, or PC.
But it's TOO easy. Convenience has lead to volume. And volume leads to personal filtering and upstream/ISP spam filtering, not to mention the overhead (headache) of processing hundreds of e-mails per day if you're any sort of knowledge worker.
Let me give you three real world examples that have caused me to re-evaluate and change my personal relationship with e-mail for critical business tasks:
1. The vanishing mailing list: I'm on a small scale mailing list discussing defense and political matters. About two weeks ago, the inbound flow of messages from the mailer simply stopped cold. I had to dig through a bunch of e-mails to find a warning sent saying inbound messages had been blocked by a third-party spam clearinghouse. So, I have to talk to my mailing list guy to go talk to the third-party spam blocker to alter his list and that's a pain for all involved.
2. Lost in the volume and filters: If you're getting a lot of e-mail, you've probably resorted to filters. And even if you are filtering, you have to keep up with building filter rules and remembering what folders hold what inbound e-mail. If you're lucky, you've managed to keep up with sorting and rules so all you have to do is remember to read all the folders that have new e-mail messages in them. If you're not so lucky/organized, you may find important e-mails lost in the noise of e-mail volume or misfiled somewhere.
3. E-mail overuse: I'm currently running through meeting invites for CTIA (News - Alert) next week. I have received two and three meeting requests from the same PR firm when one should have done the trick. Part of me is tempted to start forwarding these requests to a specific folder or simply delete them. But if I block them, I might miss something I really want to see, so I instead have to take the volume and filter it, hoping I don't miss what I want to see.
Some people resort to multiple e-mail accounts, separating business and personal matters, but this brings up the overhead of remembering multiple passwords and managing those accounts. Add on Facebook, Twitter (News - Alert), and LinkedIn accounts to generate headaches and swearing.
I know there's been a lot of “happy-happy joy-joy’ around e-mail and Twitter and SMS and IM, but there's also oversaturation of electronic media because it is so cheap and easy to use. For businesses, old fashioned voice calling shouldn't be dismissed. I'm willing to bet voice gains a bit of a comeback due to e-mail burnout and social media overload. In some situations,
Paper is a different and more nuanced story. I know it's not "green" to ask for paper, but I've been asking for vendor bills to be *gasp* mailed to me. A paper bill is a physical reminder that won't get lost in today's abundance of electronic noise. And, when carefully done, a postcard mailer can get me to websites to get more information rather than hitting the delete key on a piece of e-mail.
Edited by Jamie Epstein
