In Defense of Email
From time to time, there’s always an article that proclaims a new technology as the demise of email.
Advances in cell phones, voice mail, instant messaging, RSS, Facebook, Twitter, Google Wave - they all have been proclaimed as email killers.
Facebook (and even Microsoft’s Sharepoint technology) have their place - facilitating the collaboration of groups and the collective wisdom to complete projects. Instant Messaging (and texting in general) allows for faster communications. These styles of working cannot easily be done over email.
But what would it take to really kill email? The new technology would have to have a rich set of tools (for the interface, searching, and backup), the ability to serve as a matter of public record (e.g., compliance with government regulations), and the ability to send messages one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many (among other requirements).
However, the most important function that email provides is the ability for you to leave a message for someone and later, at their own computer and their own leisure, have them read it. This concept is called “Store and Forward”.
So far, nothing beats the Store and Forward concept.
Granted, there have been other technologies (social networks in particular) that store your messages for reading later by an audience (in fact, Facebook (and others) have email systems built into them) but because email was “first to market” it has become entrenched like no other technology.
By the way, did you know that email is 38 years old this month? Ray Tomlinson is widely regarded as the first person to send an email from one computer to another (first to himself for testing, then later a message to his colleagues explaining how to use email).
Yes, email has been the killer app for 38 years and I’m guessing, the next 38. Happy birthday, email.
Mailtips in Outlook 2010
The Microsoft Outlook Office Team has been posting and previewing some of the changes that are coming with Outlook 2010. There’s come pretty cool stuff coming down the pike! One in particular has us pretty excited - the feature called MailTips. Mailtips provides a functionality somewhat similar to our Safeguard Send, or our Attachment Forget-Me-Not add-ins. We think that this will go a long way to making sure that you are more productive than ever with email.
Recently we had a customer ask if we thought if Microsoft is stepping on our toes with the new Mailtips feature. After considering it, we decided that the answer is no. Here’s why:
Mailtips and our add-ins do not directly overlap - there are some features in Mailtips that are useful and not in any of our products (Moderated Contact Group, Invalid Recipient Address, Message Too Large For Recipient for instance). There are features that are in both (Restricted Recipient, Large Number of Recipients, External Recipient). Then there are the features that are only in our products (missing attachments, missing subjects, warn when using certain keywords).
In addition, our add-ins do not require Microsoft Exchange Server and they work in older versions (Outlook 2000 and higher).
So no, we do not think Microsoft is stepping on our toes, in fact we recommend moving to Outlook 2010 as soon as possible and think our add-ins will make a great compliment to your email platform.
Worst Email Mistakes
Recently, The Creative Group published a list of some of the mistakes that managers admitted to making. Note that these are just the ones they admit to; we have a feeling that there are many more that never see the light of day. Nonetheless, in the bullet list of 13 descriptions of gaffes 9 of them (at least by our count) could have been prevented with one of our add-ins:
“Someone sent out confidential salary information to the whole firm.”
Safeguard Send has a keyword filter and warns you when you send out an email with words like “salary information”, or “salary figures”.
“Someone made a nasty comment about a supervisor and it was sent to the supervisor by mistake. It eventually led to dismissal.”
Although the author didn’t say how this happened, it easily could have been from clicking a “Reply To All” - this could ahve been prevented with the Reply To All Monitor which simply puts a prompt like “Are you sure you want to reply to everyone?”
“A person called another employee an idiot in an e-mail to everyone in the company.”
This definitely could have been prevented with the Reply To All Monitor.
“One of our vendors accidentally e-mailed me information about their sales performance, so I gained some inside knowledge about that vendor.”
“We sent an e-mail to a client that was meant for a vendor. It made it difficult when the client had seen our costs.”
“Confidential information about one client was sent to a different client. It was certainly embarrassing.” Safeguard Send will optionally prompt you when you are sending an email outside the company, or to certain people. In all these cases above, it could have helped by alerting the sender that they were sending the email to a client - giving the sender a chance to think before sending.
“Someone crafted a scathing, sarcastic e-mail about a customer and did not mean to hit ’send.’ It caused problems.”
Here we have case where an add-in might not be as helpful as simply adding a delay to your Send/Receive time. Doing this causes your emails to sit for a few minutes in your Outbox so that if you think of anything else before the email goes out (like what being professional means to you) you can catch it and edit it. (Note: to implement the delay, go into Outlook, then to Tools…Options…Mail Setup. Uncheck the box that says “Send immediately when connected”. )
“I once sent an internal memo about restroom etiquette to a prospective client by accident.”
As soon as the words “accident” and “internal memo” show up in the same sentence, our ears perk up because it’s usually a case that our aforementioned Reply To All Monitor can help.
“Someone sent me a copy of an employee’s bank records by mistake.”
Safeguard Send, with it’s ability to warn when you are sending an email outside the company (in this case the bank) would have helped here.
Over and over again, each day many email mistakes are made - let us help you to not make one of them!
More Reply To All Troubles…
Over at Roger Matus’ Death By Email blog, he reports that Reply To All is undergoing another draconian suppression. This time instead of it being at the State Department it’s something much more closer to home: Nielson.
It turns out that Nielson has turned off the Reply To All button, suggesting that they can save server space (due to the lack of all those identical messages being replied to everyone) and save time (by forcing replies to only go to those in the conversation, preventing everyone from having to read the sometimes inane responses). This was motivated after the fact, of course, by an “errant” email. [Editor's note: See the prophetic previous blog posting].
It seems to us that for the people who know how to use Reply To All, its invaluable. So why limit it for everyone? There’s nothing wrong with implementing Permessa’s solution or own own Reply To All Monitor for those companies whose employees need full functionality out of their email client. these tools allow the best of both worlds - full email functionality and preventions of errors by unknowing uses.
Replying to everyone could be hazardous to your job
It happened again.
It’s not their fault. They were simply trying to do their job, and so when the email arrived, each person would simply hit reply to all, instead of just replying to the original sender.
In many organizations, this kind of behavior happens. But when it happens at the State Department and there are roughly six thousand recipients, and many of them click the reply to all button…well you can imagine the ensuing chaos.
Patrick Kennedy, the Under Secretary of State, sent out a missive which then threatened the employees with disciplinary action if the reply to all broadcast mechanism was abused.
While threatening the employees to not hit the reply to all button again is one way to deal with it, it can be mitigated through our own Reply To All Monitor. Some technology solution should be implemented, because in my experience, based on the customer tales that many of you have told me, I can tell you that it WILL happen again.
Here’s a few of the many links covering the story, including WebProNews, Government Computer News, and the Huffington Post.
10 Things You Should Not Put In Email
Elizabeth Charnock, of Cataphora (which makes e-discovery software for the legal community) listed 10 things you should never put in an email. The premise is that if you are going to write these phrases, then you are most likely writing something that shouldn’t be in an email. Statements like “I really shouldn’t put this in writing but…”, or “Is this actually legal?” should be red flags in your head to stop typing and start thinking. You can read all 10 statements on Roger Matus’ insightful Death By Email blog.
After thinking about this a bit, I realized that our Safeguard Send add-in - with it’s ability to inspect emails before they are sent out - might be useful here. Because the add-in can search for phrases (like the ones listed by Elizabeth Charnock) as well as keywords, it can put up a warning prompt before the email goes out to help users think before hitting Send.
Email Overload
One of the areas that interests me as a developer of tools that attempt to increase productivity are other blogs from individuals and companies doing the same.Deva Hazarika, CEO of ClearContext, wrote a blog about a new organization forming to help deal with the onslaught of email.
This new organization, the Information Overload Research Group (IORG), is an industry consortium designed to gather together some of the largest players in the field to help you, well, be more productive.
I am personally excited about this because like you, I am inundated with emails - and after all, misery loves company - plus it helps you to deal with problems if you can work on them together. To that end, I have outlined some goals for the IORG:
1) Come up with a name to identify the problem so that the general public becomes aware of the problem (and hopefully how to combat it, but awareness is part of the solution). Recognize that some interruptions you cannot stop (say, you’re a commission based salesperson), and some you wouldn’t want to stop - a commission based salesperson would probably not want to shut off his/her phone because it might be that one important sale that helps you make your sales goal that month, and you wouldn’t want to prevent an email from your boss cancelling the assignment you’re working on from reaching you.
2) Recognize and enumerate the fundamental causes of the problem (i.e., lack of self-discipline, boredom at work, too many assignments or responsibilities (and thus too many emails) - I mean, it IS possible that you are attempting to do too much (or have been assigned too much work)).
3) Identify general (non vendor specific) actions that people can take to reclaim their time…turn off the phone for periods during the day, lengthen the time between email send/receive, get senders to think about whether the email is important enough to send, etc. [Note: I see that the IORG site now has a tips archive that does this…I'll add more tips in a future blog.]
4) Identify vendor specific solutions that are available now (ClearContext, Gmail’s Email Addict). Who knows, we may throw our hat into the ring at some point - there has to be short term solutions as a stop-gap measure since the problem will only get worse while the long term solutions get ironed out.
5) Finally, create the goals that only large companies together can solve - for instance, it’d be a great world if I could specify a time each day that all my devices and methods of communication would stop attempting to interrupt me (and I mean my phones, email, and IM at least) for say, 30 minutes by default (and I’d use this much more frequently if it was as simple and reliable as turning on or off a radio). For me personally, I get my best work done in the morning, so I’d want to be able to come into work, check the messages to be sure there are no immediate fires to deal with, then work uninterrupted until around lunchtime…after which I could come back and respond to the emails and phone calls as needed. Perhaps even define a standard that cell phone companies and software vendors could adhere to if they so choose.
Here at Sperry Software, we’re always interested in how you deal with what could only be described as “too many emails”. Let me know how you handle it. Email me at president (at) SperrySoftware.com - we’ll report back after we’ve heard from a few folks and let you know how others are dealing with the problem.
In the meantime, back to work for me!
Mike Sperry
Back from Tech Ed 2008
We’re back from Tech Ed 2008! 
It was a great event - the venue (Orlando Convention Center) was terrific, not to mention the largest building I’ve ever been in. Shown in the image is James, along with our display booth.
We’d like to thank the customers that stopped by to see us, like Majestic Realty and Con-way, among others.
We’d also like to thank all the potential customers for coming by the booth. We received several ideas for new add-ins, as well as feature requests for existing add-ins.
Remember that if you received the Tech Ed 2008 20% discount code, that it expires at the end of the month.
Thanks again!
Mike Sperry
Find 37 Outlook add-ins that can make a difference!
Tech Ed 2008
Will you be at Tech Ed 2008 in Orlando, FL this year? If so, stop by our booth and say hello! Since this year’s Tech Ed event is broken up into two parts (a developer’s conference and an Exchange administrator’s conference), we will be at the second half only - June 10 through June 13.
If you haven’t made plans yet and would like to go, please contact us because we have a discount code good for $400 off the normal regular entry fee. This offer is on a limited, first come, first served basis. Just email sales@sperrysoftware.com to get the details on how to obtain your full conference attendee pass for just $1,595.
If you’ve ever wanted to meet us, please come by booth 430. We’re excited to be there and to meet you as well.
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