"I can’t believe that people ever delete their old email. I feel like there are tons of gems like this waiting to be discovered in my nearly complete Olin email archives. All except for the time I lost about a year’s worth to a hard drive crash, which coincided with my stint in CORe, sadly.
"

"His general stance on email is off — understandably so. Who could ever have predicted our email culture? He is, for example, very up for doing email on weekends because “I’d rather answer email on Sunday and be in my pyjamas on Monday”. Unless the “Monday pyjamas” refers to working from home (which isn’t mentioned anywhere), this reads like a naive assumption that an hour tackling unending email on the weekend corresponds to going in late on Monday. Which, you know, it should. But it doesn’t.
Also, this gem: ”One of the enormous attractions of email is that it is not interruptive like a telephone.” This should be true, and is for some people, but I know that I and others struggle to restrain email checking to once or twice a day. Also, check this: ”You can process [email] at your leisure, and for this reason you may reply to messages that would not stand a chance in hell of getting through the secretarial defences of corporate, telephonic life.” I think not!"

via http://twitter.com/#!/MacworldUK/status/124468278931361795

via http://twitter.com/#!/maverickwoman/status/151216156139728896"
Once in place, workers will stop receiving emails 30 minutes after they stop working; the messages will start up again 30 minutes before they arrive at work."

via http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/

via http://twitter.com/#!/houghster/status/143375298895945728

via http://twitter.com/#!/atownley/status/137108044508172288 "So the only way this matching could have occurred would be if Rich had clicked on the “Pillage Me!” button, and passed his entire address book to the new service, there to be held in limbo until such time as happy little matches like me popped up to trigger this unwelcome welcome.

I know I’ve agonised on this blog before about what makes personal data personal. About how uniqueness, utility and linkability all have a big bearing on just how “personal” a piece of data is (and how much we should therefore be bothered by its loss or misappropriation).

Just having one bit of data floating about would be concerning enough, but–and this is a big but: what if that address book pillaging also took not just the raw email address itself, but also the associated name (or indeed any other fields)?

Anon@freetibetbyforce.com may just be an address to a dead-drop online account, but if it’s ever been associated with a real name, manually entered, in someone’s address book…(you see where I’m going here?)…the consequences could be pretty horrendous. Obviously this is an extreme example–but it makes the point–third parties are sharing your email address and perhaps related personal data in vast quantities, without really realising they are doing so, with services that hold it…where? how securely? for how long? IN ORDER TO MATCH YOU UP ON SOME LAME SKILLS NETWORK SITE?"

via http://twitter.com/ksclarke/status/108268486060544000 "Gmail does ask for a birthdate when you sign up for an account, but they have not always done so, so accounts either predate that question or were set up with false information.""While there are certainly laws that Google has to comply with to serve those under 13, such as the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, it's unclear why Yahoo, but not Google, is able to provide a technological solution, the Yahoo Family Plan. Under this plan, a parent can create separate Yahoo IDs for the members of their family under 13. Such a system would fix what is so frustrating to parents about Google's actions: That even when they have decided that email is an appropriate technology for their kids, Google has overruled them.
"

via http://twitter.com/#!/dancohen/status/88960629381144576

via https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=1311182

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"There is going to be an urgent market need for tiny mechanical historians who can live in our pockets and point out our flaws.

Slicing open my own corpus, I've been surprised—and upset—to find that ideas I had then were very similar to the ones I have now. I found that my thinking on things like time, technology, or human behavior hasn't changed much since I was a 22-year-old studying document markup languages in the dark while writing advertising copy in the daytime.""There was, without the acute knife-edge of a search query slicing my life, a wealth of goofiness, a catalog of wasted flirtations and dumb thoughts and mistakes made, all displayed without consciousness of the future. A conversation organizing a cup of coffee that lasted thirty emails; a boring description of a just-purchased shirt. It was exhausting to read what this banal nerd had to say, except for one thing: The old me was so damned hopeful. I ended up liking him even if he did borrow grieving, even if his ego was a great swollen balloon that he dared the world to pop. (Often the world did. Sometimes he put the balloon in his mouth.) Unlike the portrait of self that emerged from my tightly constrained searching, this fellow was hard to classify. He was alive in his own moment, not mine. What I had assumed to be artifacts of destiny were simply precedents.""But reading the younger I's emails I can't imagine him being such a good listener as all that. I imagine we'd both start talking at once, each angling for the other's respect and admiration."

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"what once was the king of communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing is no longer the case in today’s world with the Social Web having a much more relevant and purposeful set of intentions that are driving how we connect, share and innovate with our peers, but also with our customers and business partners"

via http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/learning-from-luis-of-living-in-a-world-without-email/

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via http://booktwo.org/notebook/stop-press-for-april-20th-2/

"Two days later, the state Republican Party filed a freedom-of-information request with the university, demanding all of his e-mails containing the words “Republican,” “Scott Walker,” “union,” “rally,” and other such incendiary terms. (The Op-Ed article appeared five days after that.)"

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"Anyway, I've been thinking about an email app built on a principle of Objectivism. At the moment, my email client defaults to doing nothing, and I must intervene to create action (ie, write a reply).

But if I had an Objectivist email app, it would automatically respond to all emails with stock enabling and forceful replies after a period of (say) 15 minutes, and I would have to intervene if I wanted it to not do that."

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"You write in your book that we today seem to view authenticity with the same skittishness that the Victorians viewed sex.
For some purpose, simulation is just as good as a real. Kids call it being "alive enough." Making an airline reservation? Simulation is as good as the real. Playing chess? Maybe, maybe not. It can beat you, but do you care? Many people are building robot companions; David Levy argues that robots will be intimate companions. Where we are now, I call it the "robotic moment," not because we have robots, but because we're being philosophically prepared to have them. I'm very haunted by these children who talk about simulation as "alive enough." We're encouraged to live more and more of our lives in simulation.
You mention how when people see the little red light on their BlackBerry, indicating a message has arrived, they feel utterly compelled to grab it. Do you personally experience that compulsion?
I recognize it with my email. Somebody said of email, "It's the place for hope in life." It reminds me of how in Jane Austen, carriages are always coming, you're waiting, it could be Mr. Bingley's invitation to a ball. There's some sense that the post is always arriving in Jane Austen. There's something about email that carries the sense that that's where the good news will come. I did a hysterical interview with an accountant about why he felt so strongly about his texts. He said he might get a Genius award! I said, "I don't think they give those to accountants." And he said, "But you know what I mean." He was trying to express that anything could happen on email. Anything could happen! I try to figure out what it is that this little red light means to people. I think it's that place for hope and change and the new, and what can be different, and how things can be what they're not now. And I think we all want that."

via http://twitter.com/johnsack/status/17399736432590848

"“Mail is now only a part of Gmail,” said Mike Nelson, a Google spokesman. “It’s video conferencing, texting, it’s I.M., it’s phone calling.”"

via http://twitter.com/marijane/status/14819487249334272

via http://berglondon.com/blog/2010/12/16/thursday-links-a-drawerful-of-photographs-fictional-logos-flashy-advertising-and-space/

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"It also makes me think how email may only appear to make people accessible:"

"I used Gmail’s Priority Inbox to help. Prior to my trip, I didn’t really use this feature, but with a huge inbox, I was curious to see if it would be helpful. Not so much. I had about 60 messages automatically labeled priorities. About 30 of them were mislabeled, and 10 messages in my inbox should have been labeled, but weren’t.""The best way to manage information overload is to reduce the load. Do a careful audit. You’ll be surprised how much junk you’re probably receiving.
Filtering is your friend.
The world will not collapse if you are not checking email constantly.
More importantly, you will feel significantly better if you take time to get away. I’m going to be a lot more disciplined about having “off” time in my day-to-day life."

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via http://pastie.org/785269 via twitter "The best way to handle this is to give power users and developers an email client that can be *programmed*, so that their email client can be a component of their workflow rather than just a silo for messages."

via http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001191.html

"At Microsoft, e-mail is the medium of choice, more than phone calls, documents, blogs, bulletin boards, or even meetings (voicemails and faxes are actually integrated into our e-mail in-boxes).

I get about 100 e-mails a day. We apply filtering to keep it to that level—e-mail comes straight to me from anyone I've ever corresponded with, anyone from Microsoft, Intel, HP, and all the other partner companies, and anyone I know. And I always see a write-up from my assistant of any other e-mail, from companies that aren't on my permission list or individuals I don't know.""Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It's fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need. It also has a note-taking piece of software called OneNote, so all my notes are in digital form."

"In the meantime, and unrelated to the specific academic area, we are reminded again that emails are not secure communications. I was once advised never to put in an email what I did not want my mother to read or what I did not want to see reproduced on the front page of a national newspaper. Good advice."

"Life in a big or small company is an information game where you are judged by the amount and accuracy of your information. This game becomes more complex as you leave the individual contributor role for management, but even as an individual, you are expected to be aware of your surroundings and able to describe them to others. "

"Google Wave won't replace e-mail at all. It's a toy. A very complicated, slow and strange toy. It's not at all intuitive for me, and will be even less intuitive for so-called normal people.

It's not an improvement on e-mail though. It's an improvement for people who have sucky e-mail clients and broken e-mail habits. For someone who has a management-addled Outlook and Exchange hell, where they append 150KB of utter shite on the end of each e-mail, warning recipients that the e-mail has been through seventeen anti-virus processes, that it's absolutely and strictly confidential and that I shouldn't print out the e-mail and that if I do any of these things, they'll stick their e-lawyers on me. Of course, this is after seventeen pages of top-posted bullshit CCed to half the fucking planet.

Yeah, if you use e-mail like that, Wave is a big improvement.

But if you use e-mail sanely, and use an e-mail client that's not designed for idiots, Wave is not a big improvement. "

"To help Shirley, I thought I’d sit down and do a matrix of tasks mapped against the services you can use to get them done so she could look up what she wanted to do and it would tell her which tools to use, only I can’t.

It’s too hard.""if the promise of Google Wave is realized then a lot of the distinctions between communications software and document editors and publishing systems will disappear, but I’m sure we’ll still be able to confuse ourselves.""one of the issues with using Twitter is that messages disappear, in Real-time systems hurting long-term knowledge? Robert Scoble notes that Twitter and Friend Feed (which I will spare you here because it’s not a big part of how we work) are both much less effective than blogs when it comes to persistence and retrieval, for now anyway."

"Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation."

4-254 characters. "The mean average length of mixed email addresses, based on data compiled from six different databases (including our own), is 23". Great Honeywell ad

"Menezes says he expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before. For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.""Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely."

See also http://code.google.com/apis/wave/

"Companies spend hours crafting layouts that may not work in Eudora or Gmail, or may no longer work in Outlook. Even in programs that support the crap code used to create these layouts, all that hard visual work will go unseen if the user has unchecked “View HTML Mail” in their preferences. ""Say it with me: HTML is for websites. CSS is for websites. GIFs and JPEGs are for websites. ASCII means never having to say you’re sorry."

"email is by far the most time-consuming activity for information workers followed by searching for information. Activities that require working with others, including communicating and collaborating, or managing projects, come next followed by creating and publishing information. The costs for these activities are staggering, and this progress report shows that the number of hours spent has not improved much since IDC first started collecting this data in 2001.""Email consumes an average of 13 hours per week per information worker and is often intimately intertwined with document workflow, sales, scheduling, and other business processes."

"a very simple, RESTful approach using Atom for mailbox listings. If this sort of interface were adopted by major email providers, not only would email finally have a nice API, but it would become better integrated with our web ecosystem.""My inbox is pretty much directly represented just fine in a feed reader as it would be in an email client."

"no-one is quite sure how much the digital ephemera of an author's work are worth."

"SEAmail stands for “semantic e-mail addressing” - and will give email senders the power to send mail to people “without necessarily knowing recipients’ e-mail addresses, or even their names.”"

"ImportServer helps you import email into email applications. Specifically, the ImportServer acts like an email server that holds all your old email, ready to be downloaded into your new email application. Use ImportServer when your new email application does not provide an option to import your old email."

"Convert proprietary email formats to standard formats based on RFC-2822 (formerly RFC-822) -- the official Internet standard for email messages that has been around since 1973."