LifeHacker.Com’s Gina Trapani has a nice introduction to using e-mail filters to deal with large volumes of e-mail. The comments also include a lot of tips and suggestions on handling and filtering e-mail.

The Central Desktop Blog has a companion piece to its previous piece on the advantages of using e-mail as a collaboration tool. This time around, the developer is concerned without pointing out e-mail’s alleged failings.

The first problem with e-mail is key and one that any collaboration tool should overcome — “Email is silo’ed”. When you have multiple people working on a project, each of them have pieces of the puzzle in their inboxes, but none of them has access to each other’s pieces. This is the major flaw in e-mail.

The way around this is to use collaboration software that makes it easy for individual users to share their piece of the puzzle on a project/task by project/task basis. I use a couple of collaboration tools on a daily basis that are designed to do just that and do a remarkable job of using e-mail to collaborate.

At the extreme, Central Desktop is right — there are still materials that end up staying in the inbox rather than ending up in the collaboration system, but sometimes that is also a good thing. The key is to trust the users to know what needs to go in and what needs to be left out, and, frankly, if you can’t trust people to make those sorts of decisions it’s not likely you’re going to have a successful collaborative experience regardless of the tool you’re using.

Central Desktop’s second argument is that e-mail is inherently insecure. Yawn. Every application is inherently insecure in the way that Central Desktop means it,

I argue that email is the single most vulnerable point in any organization’s security policy. It takes two seconds to send a confidential document to anyone or any group in the world.

Right, and it takes five seconds for me to download that confidential document and mail it to anyone in the world. It takes me 10 seconds to take a screenshot of that document and mail the screenshot to anyone in the world. It might take me 15 seconds to copy the document or screenshot to a flash drive and send it to anyone in the world once I’m outside the corporate network.

If I can see it, it ain’t secure — end of story.

The rest of Central Desktop’s complaints simply indicate what happens when you’re not running a collaboration tool that uses e-mail as a central collaboration method. So, we learn that “Group email is really complicated [to install and configure]“, “Email is not a document manager,” and “Email communications do not correspond priority.”

Applications that use e-mail as a central organizing tool for collaboration solve all of these problems.

Personally, I’m a big fan of Steve Krug’s maxim for web design — “don’t make me think!” The best design/user interface is one in which the user almost forgets that they’re interacting with a user interface. The e-mail collaboration tools I use come close to achieving that, whereas the sort that Central Desktop sells always require me to devote significant brain cycles to figuring out how I’m going to do this or that function.

Death-of-email articles, like Business Week’s E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago, always leave me scratching my head (especially ones like that which includes fans of intrusive IM apps — like people aren’t interrupted enough on an average day). Typically, email’s purported replacements come down to two separate product groups: a) blogs, wikis, and other tools that are very useful and could conceivably be used entirely for collaboration instead of e-mail, and b) dedicated collaboration tools that aim to create a “virtual space” where team members collaborate, share files, etc.

Central Desktop, which sells one of these “virtual space” applications, published a widely referenced post outlining some of the reasons that e-mail, with all of its faults, is still the preferred method of collaboration at most organizations. It is universal, easy to understand even by technophobes, searchable, etc., etc. Commenters add some other reasons, to which I would add that e-mail is very robust. A lot of software I use, web servers, application servers, etc., go down, get hacked, have bugs. I think I can count the number of times I haven’t been able to access my mail server over the past 5 years on one hand. On the other hand, getting some of these virtual space applications up and running and stable with multiple users can be a real pain in the ass.

The weird thing is that after the more than 2,000 word post at Central Desktop, the lesson the company seems to have taken away is that they need to make their collaboration tool incorporate some of the features that e-mail has. That seems like a silly approach — why re-invent the wheel?

Instead, companies should build collaboration tools that are e-mail centric. I use three different collaboration applications, and all of them are essentially add-ons to e-mail. They have web interfaces and in some cases some slick AJAX mojo, but 95% of the time I interact with them through e-mail.

These applications essentially augment e-mail, adding services that store, track, automatically generate, modify, etc., messages and files related to projects.

It’s amazing how useful such an application can be. Everyone already understands e-mail, so there’s no huge learning curve to get the basic interaction down. E-mail clients are universal, so you don’t have to worry that maybe the previous point release of the Mac OS isn’t compatible with the virtual space application.

E-mail just works. Which of course means everybody and their brother has to be trying to find a way to replace it.

In case you haven’t heard, the Sinclair Broadcast group, which owns about 60 television stations, is going to basically run an hour-long anti-Kerry program. Originally reports said they were simply going to run the anti-Kerry film “Stolen Honor”, but now they’ve expanded that to say it’s some sort of pseudo-news program about Kerry’s actions after he returned from Vietnam and protested the war.

Here’s the weird thing — people are sending me e-mails about this as if I have some connection withe Sinclair or some group opposing the broadcast. Messages that go like this,

Dear Brian,

Just want you to know that I do not support River City Toyota’s advertising on the local Sinclair Broadcast Group station (KMWB). I think the station is crossing the line from news stories to one-sided politically-charged “documentaries.” I think this programming needs to be balanced by the rest of the story. Scheduling the “documentary” on John Kerry at this time is a politically motivated move.

I assume that one of my evil twins — one of the number of other Brian Carnells in the United States — has said something about this and people are Googling my name and sending me e-mail.

So for the record, I have nothing to do with the Sinclair Group and don’t really have a problem with the broadcast they are planning — those who do, especially those in the Kerry campaign issuing threats, need to reread the First Amendment. Frankly, I almost never watch anything but cable stations anyway.

There’s an interesting little article at News.Com about Plaxo’s new business model — now they’re going to charge people I only slightly know for the privilege of spamming me to see if my contact information has changed. Yippeee!

Oh, and they made it infinitesimally more difficult for its morons users to spam me,

The service also tries to limit e-mails requesting information as much as possible. People have to manually click a box for each contact before the service will send out an e-mail requesting new information.

Oh, yeah, way to go, I guess I’ll stop filtering all Plaxo e-mails into the Trash right away. Not.

I was actually surprised at the number of people who I barely knew a) had me in their contact info. and b) actually thought it was a good idea to use Plaxo. In most cases, it reminded me of why we talked so little that they had no idea if I had moved or gotten a new phone number.

Source:

Start-up Plaxo sketches out business plan. News.Com, May 23, 2004.