My Philosophy of E-Mail

MY PHILOSOPHY OF E-MAIL

Wed. Feb. 18th, 2015

My philosophy of E-mail is different from everybody else's.  It's based on my experience.  My employer started using E-mail to replace paper memos around about 1994.  Back then, we used Pine E-mail, a great DOS E-mail program.  I liked everything about it except two things: it didn't do attachments at all well, and it couldn't handle foreign letters with accent marks on top of them.  Everything else about it was cool by me.

Everybody was saying back then that the great thing about E-mail was you didn't get any junk E-mail.  I knew from the get-go it was only a matter of time until somebody figured out how to create junk E-mail, and that train left the station a long time ago as we all know.

But my impression of E-mail is not based on the relative flood of junk E-mail I receive.  ("Relative" because lots of other people get more junk E-mail than I do.)   My impression of E-mail is based on all the useful information which my supervisors and my co-workers have shared with me via E-mail over the years, and they still do.  Junk E-mail just doesn't come into to it.  I zero in on E-mails from my supervisors and from my co-workers like a homing pigeon, and that works pretty well for me.

One trick I learned for U.S. mail in the eighties still works for me a little bit.  It is getting off of mailing lists you don't want to be on.  In E-mail, that old trick still works a little bit better than the Do Not Call list works in the world of the telephone.  When I try to get off an E-mail list, I look for the listserv address (not the list address), and I write a polite but clear E-mail, and I hope for the best.

Also, my employer's spam filter is very good.  I open my spam E-mail list from time to time and skim the subject lines, because I'm a pretty quick skimmer, and sure 'nuff it's always junk.  (Since I like reading the front page of the National Enquirer when I'm standing in the supermarket checkout line, it's a natural that I derive a simple pleasure from skimming junk E-mail subject lines, and as I say it doesn't take long.)

There you have it -- why I still like E-mail.  E-mail has been good to me, so I like to speak well of it.

P.S. Great jam session at open mike tonight at Broad River Coffee and Cones.  "Open mike without the mike" we sometimes call it.