Email pollution

In No More Reply-to-All, Anne-Françoise Rutkowski and Michiel van Genuchten focus on email pollution and particularly internal pollution, which they essentially define as quantities of emails far exceeding the capabilities of recipients to effectively handle them.

Much work has been done to address email spam in recent years. Spam emails (external pollution) are typically sent from entities external to a company/group. Internal email pollution is due to an excess of emails from within a company/group. The authors argue that these types of emails can be more time-consuming than ordinary email spam:

Deleting outrageous and misleading offers from parts unknown takes only a few seconds. Reading colleagues’ e-mail messages only to find at its end that you were copied only for their convenience can take minutes.

I think this is an excellent point and it is probably also due to the fact that nowadays we often do not have to deal with many spam messages anymore: Anti-spam software has come a long way and tends to deliver a reasonable amount of protection.

The authors propose three rules to limit internal email pollution:

1. No more reply to all.
2. No more copies than originals.
3. No more e-mail fights.

Initial testing of the rules with a test group appears to have yielded positive results.

Addressing the problem is a matter of proper etiquette and training as well as good software tool support. Email spam presents an obvious (and annoying) problem, so it received attention more quickly. With most traditional email software it is hard to quantify how much time we spend with it and how much time we spend unnecessarily. I have a feeling that more and more people are becoming aware of the opportunity for improvement here. There are a number of companies out there that are working on improving email.

I am thinking rigid rules may not always be the best choice. Sometimes reply-all may be appropriate and much, much faster than adding individual names. However, reply-all to an email with more than a certain number of recipients or whose recipients contain mailing lists should at the very least raise a warning flag.

Email clients could observe and learn from our habits though. Yes, we are already able to define some rules for message handling with many different email clients. I am still hoping for clients to come up with useful rule suggestions themselves though.