Got a kick out of this – declared by Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and followed by Jeff Nolan there is a way to get out from under the mountain of email piling up in your Inbox and the demands it places on you – declare email bankruptcy.

Whether this is closer to liquidation or reorganization remains to be seen but certainly is a great way to surrender from the juggernaut that is our Inbox. Especially true if, like me, you have been out of the office for a few days and have been on a Blackberry alone.  Wired did a piece on this a while back and instructs you how to engage with your "correspondence creditors."

Looks like Fred is going with liquidation while Jeff is going to reorganization by opting with voice-only communication going forward.

I always tell people that I read every email I receive, I just don’t reply to them all – and that is proving more and more difficult but I think I can stave off email bankruptcy in the near term although I am on shaky ground.

In a recent conversation with a CISO, he was lamenting the amount of time he spends on incidents and events related to employee-generated email.

He certainly believes what we have seen at MessageGate which is that most unauthorized usage is not malicious but that there is certainly a lack of awareness about the implications of hitting the send button and creating a corporate record.

The conversation evolved and he remarked “you know what we need? A Miranda Warning for email. Something to let people know that anything they put in email these days may come back to them to explain, defend, or justify.”

That it has come to this or that email has become both our best friend and worst enemy is telling. At some point, the hassles of email will outweigh the benefits but we are still a long way from finding a better way to communicate and share in the workplace. In fact, one of our customers actually performed an analysis on the cost of an email vs. the cost of a phone call.  Email won…hands down.  The challenge is to get people to stop and think about what they are typing (or thumbing) before sending it along.  There are certainly a variety of ways to drive awareness from training seminars to a product like our SenderConfirm offering.

One company chooses to send email awareness emails – the irony in that speaks for itself.

Bad boys bad boys
Watcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do
when they come for you

Great post by Jeff Nolan on MS Outlook and the difference between what software is built for vs. what it ends up being used for (a great product management lesson and part of the natural evolution of new products).

Big surprise to everyone – people use their email for file storage!

It is certainly not what the application was designed to do, but it is how it is used and an entire generation of workers has this ingrained in their thinking.

We see pretty consistently that over 50% of the volume (size, MB/GB) of corporate email is due to MS Office attachments. Is Sharepoint or any of a number of other collaboration servers a more efficient way to share documents and work together? Yes. Will the world use email only for the pure purpose of communication? Nope.

Email has grown organically both in usage and infrastructure over a relatively short period of time (I got my first external email address at Andersen in the mid-90s) and it is now the de facto workflow, collaboration, file sharing, document management, [insert other category of enterprise software] out there.

I have followed Jeff’s blog for some time and first met him when SAP was an investor in one of my first start-up experiences.

Not that this question ranks up there with the greatest of all time, but it did come up recently in a conversation and thought it was worth sharing.

Regardless of whether technically you could lose one and not the other is not the issue here rather which do you put more value on?  If your inbox was taken away, would your world come to a halt?

I suppose this is dependent on what you do and how you manage your information.  If you are like most people, your email is your central file repository, contact manager, and #1 business application used during the day. Here’s how I see it:

   1. Inbox – information sent to you and/or many others

    * No control over who sends you what (other than spam/virus filters)
    * Some control upon receipt by automated or manual folders (managed folders approach)
    * Includes informational or no action types of messages where you are one of many, a distribution list member, or CC/BCC
    * Receiving something (i.e., successful delivery) is not the same as accepting it, agreeing with it, or implying you will act on it
    * Greater propensity to reply to an important messages thereby putting a copy of it in the Sent Folder

   2. Sent Folder – information you share with identified recipients

    * You send fewer emails than you receive and this requires deliberate action
    * Creates a personal audit trail to “prove” that you did something and when
    * Contains your original or modified work product (including ability to find the most recent one)
    * Identifies your most important contacts or at least those that you interact with more frequently

For me, I would choose the Inbox to live without. Maybe this is a function of how I work and spend my day – right or wrong. Whether you could live without both is another post.