I thought this was pretty funny when I posted on it before.  The Washington Post is running with a story on it and, of course, has to have a counterpoint to Fred’s point.  This comes in the form of Carnegie Mellon professor David Farber who is quoted in the article as saying of Fred:

"For a venture capitalist to say something like this — he should get out of the technology field," Farber said.

Now I don’t personally know David or Fred, but I think it is fair to assume the demands on their time and the volume/urgency/content of emails varies significantly.  Fred’s triage approach is similar to mine – those that are urgent or from certain senders get my attention first.  Others including CC’s don’t get a response and, in most cases, I refuse to carry on a conversation in email

Here is Fred’s response.

Email is broken and companies and individuals are trying to figure out what to do about it.  Using new/better forms of collaboration and communication like IM, blogs, RSS, and text messaging demonstrates the type of forward thinking a venture capitalist (or anyone else) must have to understand the technologies available to address the significant pain related to email.  Companies and institutions (like CMU) can’t move as fast to try and adopt new technologies organization-wide creating the demand for products (like ours) to help manage email.  The reasons for this are many from the significant investments already made in email infrastructure to institutionalized end-user habits

Email is not going away any time soon and we all have to figure out how we will manage the increasing volume of it until something better comes along.