Email is Broken

I’m sure this has been blogged about many times before –  in fact it was Richard Messiks blog post that inspired this one – but email really is broken.

You may have noticed that I’ve not blogged for a little while. This is because I’ve been in Cuba for a family holiday for 2 weeks. Internet access at the hotel cost around £10/hour and performed like a 28k modem. To make things worse, the computers only had IE6 on them which isn’t ideal for webmail clients. So my access to email was virtually non-existent.

I got back at about 10 am yesterday morning and spent until 5.30 in the evening sorting out my inbox. Not replying to emails – reviewing and deleting the mainly unnecessary emails that have accumulated over the past 2 weeks including:

• Automatically generated system messages (which are useful to me  usually- but of no interest two weeks later)
• Reported forum posts from UKBF (other moderators would have dealt with in my absence)
• Emails to internal distribution lists (I don’t now need to know the lock on the gents toilet was broken but now fixed)
• Emails I’ve been CC’d on, then all the replies – which I need to read through all of only to find out I don’t need to do or be aware of anything

There really should be more I can do to tell my mail client I’m “out of office” than just set an auto-responder. Perhaps a way for me to easily (ie, not by setting loads of convoluted rules) take myself temporarily of distribution lists. Or a way for me to know that I don’t need to read the whole chain of emails I was CCd on.

If the guys at Xobni are looking for ideas on how to make their Outlook plug in more useful then this might be a good challenge for them.