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Email overload already has a fix - filtering rules and email folders have been a thing for decades, and most popular email clients have offered convenient ways
by pferde 7y ago
Email overload already has a fix - filtering rules and email folders have been a thing for decades, and most popular email clients have offered convenient ways to quickly create the rules for nearly as long.
The problem is people not learning to properly use a tool that they spend a big part of their time with, and instead fearing that if they touch one wrong thing, one wrong button, their computer or smartphone will explode.
- chongli 7y agoLast fall I spent 4 months on a co-op term in the IT department of a reasonably large (~2000 employees, not huge) investment company. Before I started, my boss-to-be repeatedly warned me about the hundreds of emails I would have to read every day. It was rough going for the first week or so but by the second week I had a large number of folders and filtering rules set up. I had at least 80% of the emails being marked as read and tucked away as soon as they were received, since they were mostly log files I only needed to look at if something went wrong. The problem is people not learning to properly use a tool that they spend a big part of their time with, and instead fearing that if they touch one wrong thing, one wrong button, their computer or smartphone will explode. I have no idea how to cure people of this problem. I have been trying to teach my dad how to use his computer and phone nearly all my life. He's learning things, sure, but there's never any moment where I feel like I've handed him the keys to the Corvette, so to speak. Each time I show him how to do something, it's like I'm driving him to a different appointment.
- mehrdadn 7y agoIMO writing good filters can be pretty hard. I literally spent what must've been an entire hour on updating just 1 Gmail filter today. All going through my mailbox cross-checking to make sure it would mark exactly what was needed, no more, no less. (It'd have been a lot easier if I was more tolerating of errors, but the entire reason I was updating it was to eliminate errors that had started getting annoying. And I'm guessing errors are one reason why some people don't use filters.)
- pmlnr 7y agoGmail filters a sh*t compared to what Sieve with regex is capable of.
- mehrdadn 7y agoMaybe for you, but the capabilities and mechanics of the filters is not where I run into trouble, and regexes would not make much difference. Gmail filters are already pretty darn good for my needs. Figuring out the correct conditions conceptually is the hard part. OTOH, I'm told you can't apply Sieve filters retroactively? That sounds completely awful.
- pferde 7y agoMost people can get by with nothing more complex than "put all messages from this sender to folder X", or a few similar options. Heck, even MS Outlook makes this easy. If Google makes this difficult, that's on them.
- mehrdadn 7y ago"Filter messages like this" is literally in their drop-down for precisely this...
- mrweasel 7y agoFor some reason email is singled out as a problem to fix, and profit from. Word processing and spreadsheets are equally broken, very few people actually know how to use Word or Excel to any meaningful proficiency. I don't buy that email is broken, not anymore than other communication means at least. The clients may be too hard to use or too limited in functionality. The sad truth is that beyond a few walled of webmail solutions, like Gmail or Yahoo, development of email clients have stalled. Add to that companies that spend zero effort in education staff in using Outlook (because let's face it, we're talking about Outlook for the most part, when talking work emails).