I'll bet far less than 50 percent of your e-mail from the outside has any meaning to your job, and you waste precious time sifting for those few e-mail messages that you need to read. It's not that we haven't tried to hide from the spam. Some people have multiple e-mail addresses. But secondary e-mail addresses are only good until they become overexposed or corrupted by junk mailing lists. You can forget about mail filters and removal requests, which are mostly ineffective. And skip the promises of e-mail privacy at the bottom of Web pages. Are you really going to check if they've sold their mailing list?
What's more, vendors and other legitimate correspondents that use e-mail for everything, including invoicing, product support updates, newsletters, press releases, earnings reports, solicitations and sales promotions, are making a big mistake. It's impossible for the recipient to tell one type of e-mail from another, making it likely that the good e-mail will be tossed away with the bad.
There ought to be a law, and maybe there will be. But legal measures to curb unwanted e-mail are in limbo, and even if there is legislation, it may take years for enforcement to take hold.
In the meantime, we need to look for new technology approaches. There must be a better mechanism to control what is sent to an e-mail address and to categorize it. This will require improvements to the standard protocols that help automatically classify e-mail as it is sent and received.
One method might be to authenticate e-mail senders using the same kind of certificate mechanism used for online transactions. Another method would be to create a packaging and postage system that can handle e-mail more intelligently than the bulk e-mail filters used today. Yet another method could be an e-mail reader that automatically parses relevant content with a key encryption method that's shared by an organization and a vendor.
There is no final solution in this ongoing battle, but one thing is certain: You owe it to yourself, your fellow employees and your company to address this issue.
