Email is not dead. Email is not wrong. Email is not broken. Is it awesome to use all the time? No, of course not. But, as a medium, it is fine that is suiting it's purpose fairly well.
Email is not dead. Email is not wrong. Email is not broken. Is it awesome to use all the time? No, of course not. But, as a medium, it is fine that is suiting it's purpose fairly well.
Recently, and as far back as the last few years, it seems like every day there is a new app that portends to solve the dreaded email problem. And sure, maybe they do a good job of helping users to get a grapple on their inbox and seemingly insurmountable level of unread emails. But, on the other hand, I don't know of any apps that do a particularly bad job of this. Note, I've only really used Apple Mail and Gmail though, so I could be missing the boat on this.
It seems to me more so that there is an issue with the users who are interacting with their apps and/or email in general. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with these people, some people probably do get thousands of emails daily, and in their case; good luck. But for those of us who get ~100 or less emails a day, then I think it's just a problem with how we use the apps, not the apps themselves.
Of course there are different filtering systems for each app and different ways to separate emails in folders or sub-folders, and they each have pluses and minuses; at least I would imagine they do. There was a good article on Mac AppStorm showing how to simply use Apple Mail as a great mail app. And, while I don't do all these thigns here, I've been happily using Mail for 5+ years and find it fairly simplistic and robust enough to suffice for my needs. I regularly hit the fabled Inbox Zero daily, or every few days, but this is more so because I am OCD when it comes to things like this.
I don't mean to take anything away from the designers and developers who have spent umpteen hours building these apps, they certainly have had good intentions. But at some point, are they trying to solve issues that are perhaps more unique to them than to the masses? I might be incline to think so, but maybe this is more of me just being lazy and not wanting to try to learn a new program when the current one more than suffices for me. Probably a little from column A and a litte from column B.
Mused on February 12, 2013