Too much of a good thing (16 Jul 2004)

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Too much of a good thing (16 Jul 2004)
But if e-mail is so good, why does it feel so bad, especially for those of us who send and receive a lot of mail? Why can't today's dominant e-mail programs (such as Microsoft's Outlook or Qualcomm's Eudora) automatically prioritize your messages in your in box, or easily search for one old message hidden in a stash of hundreds of thousands? Why, instead, do we need to construct elaborate triage strategies -- sorting, filtering, filing, redirecting, etc. -- just to make sure we don't miss anything important? And, despite these, why do we still so often miss what is important, and why are we bombarded by the trivial? Why, most fundamentally, must we constantly work on our e-mail, vigilantly imposing our own schemes of order upon the incoming chaos, constantly guarding against getting behind, against the shame of e-mail bankruptcy?

Article URL: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/07/16/e_mail/index.html

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