The fertile, spacious Ausonian plain,
Will produce so many gadflies and locusts,
The solar brightness will become clouded,
All devoured, great plague to come from them.
So predicted Nostradamus in 1555. Despite the world not ending on 4 July 1999 and even scraping through Y2K with hardly a scratch, I fear that the plague of locusts may be imminent. In a metaphorical sense. For the mounting volume of e-mailââ,¬"both legitimate and spamââ,¬"may prove to be a plague which business will not survive. In the not-too-distant future, we'll actually stop working completely and spend all our time reading, and responding to, e-mail. (We won't actually be working shorter hoursââ,¬"our productivity and output will just drop to zero as we communicate in increasing volume about what we should be doing.)
Firstly, as almost everyone with an Internet connection can attest, the best configured Inbox struggles (and generally fails) to fend itself against a tide of spam. Within 24 hours I've been offered three jobs working from home (from a -very successful Fortune 500 company" that must be defying the general economic downturn), extensions to certain parts of my anatomy, various herbal remedies, and a discounted holiday in Florida (airfares not included). Not to mention the offer to assist in exporting US$14.5M from Nigeria from not just Dr Igho Tobore, but his wife and son!
In fact, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Junk Email (with the easy to remember acronym CAUBE.AU), a number of surveys found that the volume of spam increased by a factor of six from 1991 to 2001. This means the volume of spam is doubling every 4.5 months, a trend which CAUBE.AU confirmed between 2001 and 2002. An e-mail addressââ,¬"created in Australia for the purpose of measuring spamââ,¬"received up to 1385 spam e-mails in one week! SurfControl also found Christmas to increase spam by 650 percent.
Spam, of course, is at one extreme of the e-mail plague. As e-mail is used more and more as a tool to communicate, not just across the world, but across the hallway and between cubicles, the volume of work e-mail increases. In some cases, it's hard to differentiate between spam and a co-worker announcing to the world the fact that they need to leave at 4pm today. In fact, I know a few people who apply filtering rules to mail they receive from colleagues so they can cope with the e-mail influx.
According to Ferris Research, last year corporate users spent an average of five minutes dealing with each e-mail, meaning that workers could be spending four hours a day managing their e-mail by next year. Another report in 2000 predicted that the number of commercial e-mails received annually by the average US consumer will explode from 40 in 1999 to 1600 in 2005. So if the volume doublesââ,¬"give it another year or soââ,¬"that's eight hours a day managing e-mail.
And if the number of e-mails rises as quickly as predicted, we'll soon be doing nothing else than managing our e-mail.
So, where to from here if we are to survive the plague? Useful subject headings help the management process, making it much quicker to respond (or dispose of) e-mails as relevant. It seemsââ,¬"though I may be wrong in my general observationââ,¬"that as we adopt e-mail as our preferred means of communication, the quality and usefulness of subjects lines continues to improve. The writing style of e-mails continues to be increasingly abruptââ,¬"starting with -Dear Fred" seems a waste of time and effort when this is the eighth e-mail you've sent to Fred in the past two hours. Likewise, punctuation and grammatical accuracy is becoming an anachronism. V hard to b exact /w grammar when writing so many e-mails. It will be interesting to see how far this trend goes, and whether it gradually transforms how we write more formal communications.
Though, whatever we do, the swarm of e-mail will get thicker. I suggest you start deleting every fourth one, randomly. Then every third one. And, eventually, when we start deleting every e-mail and realise that no-one actually notices, we can start getting back to work. Otherwise, I predict the world (or at least the economy) will end about 4 July 2004. Remember, you read it here first!
Oliver Descoeudres is marketing manager at network IP/Internet network infrastructure builder and solutions provider NetStar Australia. He can be contacted at marketing@netstarnetworks.com or on 02 9805 9759.
i am only a home user but i am sick of the email that i get that are no use to us in australia i have spent most of today asking to be removed from email lists i have never put a fake email address down but from now i will