11 ms·

Email is not broken, we are.

56 points by ljoshua 15y ago

richardk 15y ago
This article is a wake up call, thank you.
jkmurray 15y ago
Couldn't agree more. Email should be something like: "I want to know it, but I don't need to know it right now. Otherwise I should have called you." Let's try to get that back.
jkmurray 15y ago
Couldn't agree more. Email should be something like: "I want to know it, but I don't need to know it right now. Otherwise I should have called you." Let's try to get that back.
alexchamberlain 15y ago
Your article failed to address the main issue: security. Off by default is broken.
Jakob 15y ago
> When using email, sending tons of short, not fully formed messages is killing us. We need to take the time to construct useful, productive messages, something most of us are not doing. That's true. Since I began writing well-formed longer emails I receive fewer ones and nearly no IM-style "yes.", "how about that?" anymore. It's also much more satisfying to write and, I hope, to read.
delinka 15y ago
I've seen evidence of 'broken email authors' for many years. I'd write a thorough email with explanations and questions and I'd get a reply answering the first question with a single "yes" and no more content.
CoffeeAndCoffee 15y ago
Some people are using e-mail like IM and e-mail is built as an asynchronous communication system. In my opinion, that's where the friction happens. The author of this post brings up a great point about defining expectations on reply times. I think it's healthy to create an auto-reply that states that you only check e-mail x number of times a day.
- cdcarter 15y ago
  I would find getting an auto-reply for every email I send to someone, just telling me they won't be looking at it until later that day ~incredibly~ frustrating. I do not need that email on my phone. I do not need that email in my box. Perhaps a rapportive like sidebar, but not as an email proper, please.
enginous 15y ago
We should be adapting computers to work for humans, not adapting humans to work for computers. I agree that there are tons of improvements to be made to effective e-mail use in organizations. But many of the behaviors we exhibit are completely natural to us and difficult to change. For example, we check our e-mail on what psychologists refer to as a variable interval reinforcement schedule; we know that at approximately some interval we get an e-mail that is helpful or enjoyable to us, and we waste our time checking for that e-mail. It's hard to change the e-mail we receive on a global scale in one instant. It's quite a lot easier to develop tools that change how the e-mail we receive is displayed to us. One such concept was the Gmail priority inbox: what if you only got notifications for the e-mail that was important and could buffer up the rest for later? A complete theory of how e-mail could work might easily involve a hybrid approach. Why aren't people suggesting solutions that could work instead of debating approaches? Does it have to be one way or the other?
- ljoshua 15y ago
  Great comment enginous. I want to look into variable interval reinforcement now, as I've been approaching this from more of a research-based angle. The solutions should be hybrid, though I still believe that better behavior, reinforced by technology, is what will be the most effective. If you have your client reinforcing good checking schedules, that's a behavioral/technical win/win.
  - enginous 15y ago
    That's a great point: technology can be very effective at shaping human behavior. You might want to check out the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab's project on behavior design[0], which has some resources about how to use technology to change human behavior. [0] http://captology.stanford.edu/projects/behaviordesign.html http://captology.stanford.edu/projects/behaviordesign.html
plant42 15y ago
Wow, someone finally gets it. The application isn't broken, the users are. We expect too much from it, wanting it to be our todo list and other roles that it plainly wasn't designed for. I email doesn't do what you need or want, then find something else that does. If you cannot, then build it and release to the world.
plant42 15y ago
Wow, someone finally gets it. The application isn't broken, the users are. We expect too much from it, wanting it to be our todo list and other roles that it plainly wasn't designed for. I email doesn't do what you need or want, then find something else that does. If you cannot, then build it and release to the world.
toast76 15y ago
What ever happened to "there are no stupid users, only stupid websites/applications"? The user is not broken. Wanting email to be MORE than it is does not mean users are wrong. The fact is that email does not do what the average user wants it to do. Telling people to change their habits is...well...stupid. Before anyone chimes in with "email isn't broken, but the clients may be". Whether this is a client issue or protocol issue is irrelevant. 99.9% of users do not know what SMTP is let alone why it is not broken. The email experience is broken. End of story. No blog post required.
- nck4222 15y ago
  I agree. If a technology is causing people to use it sub-optimally, then the technology should be improved.
  - aethr 15y ago
    I disagree. The structure and/or implementation of email is not "causing people to use it sub-optimally". If you want to manage projects and tasks, there are very good tools available for accomplishing that goal. But don't expect all your clients to start using your management tool because you think it would be "optimal". Email is convenient and easy for them, and they don't have to learn a new system to use it. If you want to send files to other people, there are already specialized tools for that. Tools that have no size limits, that don't limit file extensions, etc. But don't expect all your clients to start using those tools unless they have a good reason to. Email is convenient and easy for them, and they don't have to learn a new system to send files with it. There are endless other workflows for email, most of which have a specialized alternative, an "improved" version of the underlying technology. When an individual gets tired of the inadequacies of a certain facet of email, they will find it and start using the alternative. Until that point, they will use email because it is "good enough". People actually are sub-optimal. I meant to start riding my bike to my new job, the money and health benefits would be optimal. But I'm not optimal, so I'm still taking the train. Until I find a compelling reason to start riding again, I'm going to keep taking the train because it's "good enough". That doesn't mean that the train system needs to be fixed. Frankly, I think the whole "let's fix email" debate is a complete non-starter, and the bevy of related blog posts popping up for the past two weeks is a whole lot of noise from people who haven't actually thought the complexities of "the problem" through, at all.
kenrikm 15y ago
It's 2012 we have a 100mb up/down connection and yet I still can't attach a file over 10MB and not have it bounce back. I can't believe that any self respecting hacker does not see room for improvement in that situation. I should not have to work around that situation (yousendit, dropbox etc..) it should just work. I'm firmly in the "it's broken" camp.
- peterwoo 15y ago
  Would you be willing to suggest a global minimum bound on the amount of data that you should be allowed to push onto anyone's mail server?
  - kenrikm 15y ago
    That's the issue, the sender should be doing the heavy lifting (serving the file or at least delegating it) what I propose it more of a seamless imbed/download link on files over a certain size. This could be implemented in email apps using services like iCloud, Dropbox, YouSend it etc.. I know that plugins can be added to certain email apps to accomplish this however that is going down the same path that Netscape did with the browser back in the day and is only now being corrected. Seamless is the goal I should not have to upload/copy/paste It should just be able to take a normal attachment and decide how to handle it based on size etc..
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  It's 2012. We have servers/services on which we can post files/attachments, either encrypted or access-controlled, and email links to those documents.
  - barik 15y ago
    But that's just it. Being that it's 2012, the e-mail client should be smart enough to do this. I should be able to attach a large attachment to an e-mail (since that's the logical place to make the association), and then, depending on the attachment size, the e-mail client should automatically move it to Dropbox or some other service and translate the attachment into a link for me. The difference between the your first approach and the second is that yours requires a behavioral change. The second approach does not. Put another way, it is often easier to change the situation (by making it the path of least resistance) than the person when you want someone to do something else. It seems like some of this is already in the works, fortunately: http://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/15/thunderbird-to-get-dropbox-and-file-hosting-integration/ http://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/15/thunderbird-to-get-dropbox-... Maybe it already exists in certain clients (Exchange and Outlook?) and I just haven't looked hard enough.
h4ck3rhn 15y ago
My response is more tuned towards corporate/enterprise/more-than-20-person teams. so we got salesforce for CRM, getsatisfaction/others for support, jira for project management, tons of enterprise minded apps, yet people resort to email. why? its easier to just type in an email as opposed to logging in / filling a form, and last but not the least treating notifications sent by email in same vein as a human being. Whats pathetic is "IT" sets up these apps and does pilot program and claims success. I believe more idiot-proof-apps, as easy as email client app shows up, lesser will be "emails"
- Duff 15y ago
  The idiot proof app is email. Email is the digital successor to the memorandum, which is turn the apex of a line of written communication mechanisms dating back thousands of years. A Sumerian boss got his reports via tablet. Phahroh via papyrus. Roosevelt via telegram. Pershing via a rolled up message tied to a bird. Instead of futzing around with some fragile app which may or may not be designed for what I'm doing, I can send an email to nearly anyone on earth that I need to deal with.
jodrellblank 15y ago
Does anyone else feel that e-mail is not broken, but task/project management systems are? Fundamentally, doing "productive work" boils down multiple individual tasks which some humans are doing, while at the same time referencing and updating some store of information/documentation/metadata to find what to do, and say when/how it's been done. Computers should be great at assisting with this administration - the bicycle of the mind helps get you where you want to go. The fact that email is used to move tasks between people, as the place to create new tasks, as the place to discuss tasks, as the default todo-list for a day unless you go out of your way to move information elsewhere, is all not a failing of email or behaviour, it's a failing of project management and shared todo list and documentation systems. They don't do it, so email does. If you had a place where that kind of stuff was tracked /well/ it would be trivial to use it to do all this stuff and email would fall by the wayside because it would be less good. Email would become for personal, direct contact, and notifications of things that you request be sent to you. Too much work should not build up in individual inboxes, it should build up in shared project management system - and a company can then choose to allocate more people to it. Asking one person for information because it isn't documented and searchable should not be the norm. Asking one person what needs to happen next because it isn't tracked shouldn't be normal. Emailing prototypes to your colleagues because there is no centralised storage that works nicely shouldn't be the default. It even seems tantalisingly easy to build - tree structured projects with nested tasks, granular user permissions, a designed UI to answer questions like "which bits need work", "which bits need questions answering", "which bits are underplanned", "what should I be doing". Templates of procedures so you can set regular patterned actions in motion. It sort of exists. It's sort of in CRM and Sharepoint workflows, it's sort of in individual task lists, it's sort of being made real. But not yet. Normal cars are no good at moving lots of goods. The way to fix that is not to make family cars with reinforced axles and tractor tyres, and it's not to teach people to drive slower so they can balance things more carefully. It's to invent vans and trucks and trains.
- aethr 15y ago
  I agree with the sentiment of what (I think) you're trying to get at. However, the problem that some people have raised is that there are many different task management/project management systems out there, and clients interfacing with multiple technology suppliers may not want to learn all of them. Email has one (simple) interface that you can use to delegate tasks to all your suppliers regardless of what management software they use. Furthermore, the client creating the task may not be able to describe it to the same extent that an engineer needs, or know enough to fill out all the meta data required. To this end, they send their task via email to the engineer (or project manager) and this person enters it into their company's management tool, transmuting it into the appropriate technical specs/jargon at this point. This may seem like an "extra step", but there are tools for Outlook/gmail to create tasks in popular task management software such as JIRA or Basecamp. Furthermore, someone will likely still have to clean the data up to make it engineer friendly, and assign it to someone. As long as this has to be done, it doesnt seem like copying/pasting an email into a task description is really that much extra work.
ChristianMarks 15y ago
Marx thought he could change human nature too.

56 points by ljoshua 15y ago

This article is a wake up call, thank you.

Couldn't agree more. Email should be something like: "I want to know it, but I don't need to know it right now. Otherwise I should have called you." Let's try to get that back.

jkmurray 15y ago

Couldn't agree more. Email should be something like: "I want to know it, but I don't need to know it right now. Otherwise I should have called you." Let's try to get that back.

alexchamberlain 15y ago

Your article failed to address the main issue: security. Off by default is broken.

Jakob 15y ago

> When using email, sending tons of short, not fully formed messages is killing us. We need to take the time to construct useful, productive messages, something most of us are not doing. That's true. Since I began writing well-formed longer emails I receive fewer ones and nearly no IM-style "yes.", "how about that?" anymore. It's also much more satisfying to write and, I hope, to read.

delinka 15y ago

I've seen evidence of 'broken email authors' for many years. I'd write a thorough email with explanations and questions and I'd get a reply answering the first question with a single "yes" and no more content.

CoffeeAndCoffee 15y ago

Some people are using e-mail like IM and e-mail is built as an asynchronous communication system. In my opinion, that's where the friction happens. The author of this post brings up a great point about defining expectations on reply times. I think it's healthy to create an auto-reply that states that you only check e-mail x number of times a day.

cdcarter 15y ago
I would find getting an auto-reply for every email I send to someone, just telling me they won't be looking at it until later that day ~incredibly~ frustrating. I do not need that email on my phone. I do not need that email in my box. Perhaps a rapportive like sidebar, but not as an email proper, please.

enginous 15y ago

We should be adapting computers to work for humans, not adapting humans to work for computers. I agree that there are tons of improvements to be made to effective e-mail use in organizations. But many of the behaviors we exhibit are completely natural to us and difficult to change. For example, we check our e-mail on what psychologists refer to as a variable interval reinforcement schedule; we know that at approximately some interval we get an e-mail that is helpful or enjoyable to us, and we waste our time checking for that e-mail. It's hard to change the e-mail we receive on a global scale in one instant. It's quite a lot easier to develop tools that change how the e-mail we receive is displayed to us. One such concept was the Gmail priority inbox: what if you only got notifications for the e-mail that was important and could buffer up the rest for later? A complete theory of how e-mail could work might easily involve a hybrid approach. Why aren't people suggesting solutions that could work instead of debating approaches? Does it have to be one way or the other?

ljoshua 15y ago
Great comment enginous. I want to look into variable interval reinforcement now, as I've been approaching this from more of a research-based angle. The solutions should be hybrid, though I still believe that better behavior, reinforced by technology, is what will be the most effective. If you have your client reinforcing good checking schedules, that's a behavioral/technical win/win.
- enginous 15y ago
  That's a great point: technology can be very effective at shaping human behavior. You might want to check out the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab's project on behavior design[0], which has some resources about how to use technology to change human behavior. [0] http://captology.stanford.edu/projects/behaviordesign.html http://captology.stanford.edu/projects/behaviordesign.html

plant42 15y ago

Wow, someone finally gets it. The application isn't broken, the users are. We expect too much from it, wanting it to be our todo list and other roles that it plainly wasn't designed for. I email doesn't do what you need or want, then find something else that does. If you cannot, then build it and release to the world.

plant42 15y ago

toast76 15y ago

What ever happened to "there are no stupid users, only stupid websites/applications"? The user is not broken. Wanting email to be MORE than it is does not mean users are wrong. The fact is that email does not do what the average user wants it to do. Telling people to change their habits is...well...stupid. Before anyone chimes in with "email isn't broken, but the clients may be". Whether this is a client issue or protocol issue is irrelevant. 99.9% of users do not know what SMTP is let alone why it is not broken. The email experience is broken. End of story. No blog post required.

nck4222 15y ago
I agree. If a technology is causing people to use it sub-optimally, then the technology should be improved.
- aethr 15y ago
  I disagree. The structure and/or implementation of email is not "causing people to use it sub-optimally". If you want to manage projects and tasks, there are very good tools available for accomplishing that goal. But don't expect all your clients to start using your management tool because you think it would be "optimal". Email is convenient and easy for them, and they don't have to learn a new system to use it. If you want to send files to other people, there are already specialized tools for that. Tools that have no size limits, that don't limit file extensions, etc. But don't expect all your clients to start using those tools unless they have a good reason to. Email is convenient and easy for them, and they don't have to learn a new system to send files with it. There are endless other workflows for email, most of which have a specialized alternative, an "improved" version of the underlying technology. When an individual gets tired of the inadequacies of a certain facet of email, they will find it and start using the alternative. Until that point, they will use email because it is "good enough". People actually are sub-optimal. I meant to start riding my bike to my new job, the money and health benefits would be optimal. But I'm not optimal, so I'm still taking the train. Until I find a compelling reason to start riding again, I'm going to keep taking the train because it's "good enough". That doesn't mean that the train system needs to be fixed. Frankly, I think the whole "let's fix email" debate is a complete non-starter, and the bevy of related blog posts popping up for the past two weeks is a whole lot of noise from people who haven't actually thought the complexities of "the problem" through, at all.

kenrikm 15y ago

It's 2012 we have a 100mb up/down connection and yet I still can't attach a file over 10MB and not have it bounce back. I can't believe that any self respecting hacker does not see room for improvement in that situation. I should not have to work around that situation (yousendit, dropbox etc..) it should just work. I'm firmly in the "it's broken" camp.

peterwoo 15y ago
Would you be willing to suggest a global minimum bound on the amount of data that you should be allowed to push onto anyone's mail server?
- kenrikm 15y ago
  That's the issue, the sender should be doing the heavy lifting (serving the file or at least delegating it) what I propose it more of a seamless imbed/download link on files over a certain size. This could be implemented in email apps using services like iCloud, Dropbox, YouSend it etc.. I know that plugins can be added to certain email apps to accomplish this however that is going down the same path that Netscape did with the browser back in the day and is only now being corrected. Seamless is the goal I should not have to upload/copy/paste It should just be able to take a normal attachment and decide how to handle it based on size etc..
dredmorbius 15y ago
It's 2012. We have servers/services on which we can post files/attachments, either encrypted or access-controlled, and email links to those documents.
- barik 15y ago
  But that's just it. Being that it's 2012, the e-mail client should be smart enough to do this. I should be able to attach a large attachment to an e-mail (since that's the logical place to make the association), and then, depending on the attachment size, the e-mail client should automatically move it to Dropbox or some other service and translate the attachment into a link for me. The difference between the your first approach and the second is that yours requires a behavioral change. The second approach does not. Put another way, it is often easier to change the situation (by making it the path of least resistance) than the person when you want someone to do something else. It seems like some of this is already in the works, fortunately: http://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/15/thunderbird-to-get-dropbox-and-file-hosting-integration/ http://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/15/thunderbird-to-get-dropbox-... Maybe it already exists in certain clients (Exchange and Outlook?) and I just haven't looked hard enough.

h4ck3rhn 15y ago

My response is more tuned towards corporate/enterprise/more-than-20-person teams. so we got salesforce for CRM, getsatisfaction/others for support, jira for project management, tons of enterprise minded apps, yet people resort to email. why? its easier to just type in an email as opposed to logging in / filling a form, and last but not the least treating notifications sent by email in same vein as a human being. Whats pathetic is "IT" sets up these apps and does pilot program and claims success. I believe more idiot-proof-apps, as easy as email client app shows up, lesser will be "emails"

Duff 15y ago
The idiot proof app is email. Email is the digital successor to the memorandum, which is turn the apex of a line of written communication mechanisms dating back thousands of years. A Sumerian boss got his reports via tablet. Phahroh via papyrus. Roosevelt via telegram. Pershing via a rolled up message tied to a bird. Instead of futzing around with some fragile app which may or may not be designed for what I'm doing, I can send an email to nearly anyone on earth that I need to deal with.

jodrellblank 15y ago

Does anyone else feel that e-mail is not broken, but task/project management systems are? Fundamentally, doing "productive work" boils down multiple individual tasks which some humans are doing, while at the same time referencing and updating some store of information/documentation/metadata to find what to do, and say when/how it's been done. Computers should be great at assisting with this administration - the bicycle of the mind helps get you where you want to go. The fact that email is used to move tasks between people, as the place to create new tasks, as the place to discuss tasks, as the default todo-list for a day unless you go out of your way to move information elsewhere, is all not a failing of email or behaviour, it's a failing of project management and shared todo list and documentation systems. They don't do it, so email does. If you had a place where that kind of stuff was tracked /well/ it would be trivial to use it to do all this stuff and email would fall by the wayside because it would be less good. Email would become for personal, direct contact, and notifications of things that you request be sent to you. Too much work should not build up in individual inboxes, it should build up in shared project management system - and a company can then choose to allocate more people to it. Asking one person for information because it isn't documented and searchable should not be the norm. Asking one person what needs to happen next because it isn't tracked shouldn't be normal. Emailing prototypes to your colleagues because there is no centralised storage that works nicely shouldn't be the default. It even seems tantalisingly easy to build - tree structured projects with nested tasks, granular user permissions, a designed UI to answer questions like "which bits need work", "which bits need questions answering", "which bits are underplanned", "what should I be doing". Templates of procedures so you can set regular patterned actions in motion. It sort of exists. It's sort of in CRM and Sharepoint workflows, it's sort of in individual task lists, it's sort of being made real. But not yet. Normal cars are no good at moving lots of goods. The way to fix that is not to make family cars with reinforced axles and tractor tyres, and it's not to teach people to drive slower so they can balance things more carefully. It's to invent vans and trucks and trains.

aethr 15y ago
I agree with the sentiment of what (I think) you're trying to get at. However, the problem that some people have raised is that there are many different task management/project management systems out there, and clients interfacing with multiple technology suppliers may not want to learn all of them. Email has one (simple) interface that you can use to delegate tasks to all your suppliers regardless of what management software they use. Furthermore, the client creating the task may not be able to describe it to the same extent that an engineer needs, or know enough to fill out all the meta data required. To this end, they send their task via email to the engineer (or project manager) and this person enters it into their company's management tool, transmuting it into the appropriate technical specs/jargon at this point. This may seem like an "extra step", but there are tools for Outlook/gmail to create tasks in popular task management software such as JIRA or Basecamp. Furthermore, someone will likely still have to clean the data up to make it engineer friendly, and assign it to someone. As long as this has to be done, it doesnt seem like copying/pasting an email into a task description is really that much extra work.

ChristianMarks 15y ago

Marx thought he could change human nature too.