I love email so much, I email -myself- all the time.
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I used to do that, but then I got paranoid, thinking that some were just phishing things trying to find out if my account was active, and so clicking âunsubscribeâ would just result in more junk mail. I donât know if that concern is legitimate. Now I just set up a rule for each junk mail that directs any subsequent emails from that address straight to my Junk folder.
I do that! Itâs my version of a scratch pad, to send myself reminders, sometimes even grocery lists.
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Another vote for email as a fantastic communication medium, if used properly. Itâs asynchronous-- write it at 3AM if you get an idea then, and the reader can read it at 9 AM, or whenever is most convenient. It doesnât interrupt life like phone calls.
One thing that helps me is to have about 6 different email accounts, for different functions (personal, urgent biz, regular biz, likely-to-be-spammed, etc). That plus a good spam blocker makes for a very good signal-to-noise ratio.
It also helps to use the FART process on incoming mail (file away-act on-refer/forward-trash). Make one pass through and do one of those immediately. Then the queue of remaining emails is short, and makes a nice to-do list (including reminders sent to myself). If the list gets longer than about 20 items, apply FART.
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You guys, I fixed email!
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Email is literally like any other tool you have. Phone calls. Commutes. Books. Articles. You make it work for you on your schedule. I have clients e-mail me at 6:04. They donât get an answer until the next morning. And not first thing. I read their e-mail when I get into the office.
You treat it like itâs not important. Thatâs the first step. Like itâs a note being passed in class. By total morons that donât bother to read your notes. So treat it with the correct amount of respect.
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I used to work in a small office. My desk was right next to the sales cubicles; Iâd have people shout over their cubicles to ask if Iâd gotten their email; in many cases, I would hear the Mail.app âwhooshâ coming from their computers as they asked.
I donât remember where I saw the advice, I think it was on 43 Folders, but the advice was to set a long time limit between checks. 30 minutes was the longest timespan I could get away with. My productivity jumped when I didnât have my email thingamabobsky going off every 5 minutes.
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[quote=âMal_Tosevite, post:27, topic:59664â]I donât remember where I saw the advice, I think it was on 43 Folders, but the advice was to set a long time limit between checks. 30 minutes was the longest timespan I could get away with. My productivity jumped when I didnât have my email thingamabobsky going off every 5 minutes.
[/quote]Oh, this, definitely. We have two monitors and I always have email minimized. I can finish my work and then see if anything important requires attention. And then back to work. No notifications in the tray either.
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One of many, many things they are doing wrong!
But I use it as a lesson to remind myself that you have to figure out what mode of communication works best for each client. For some itâs email, others itâs chat, for some it can be personal email.
And when you are trying to do records retention, compliance, or info governance, the fact that the âcommunication system of recordâ is completely broken is an interesting puzzle to solve.
Thanks? No one has complained about them⌠to my face⌠so far.
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I like email. Email remembers what I donât. Phone conversations are good for getting quick answer that doesnât have have much information to remember. For example: âon Thursdayâ, âitâs a catâ or ânoâ. But important or complicated messages Iâd rather receive by email.
But Iâm not very fond of the email clients that Iâm using. I was pretty fine with PineâŚ
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Exactly this. If you talk to me, or phone me, about something work related, chances are some detail will be lost and we will both lose time while I redo the analysis or whatever. If everything is described in a email, I can reference it as I work.
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Alpine, its clone, is pretty good and strong. I for one am running it. Screw the webmails, apps and other crap.
After suffering with LotusNotes for my current employer. Ugh. Anything, Anything but that. I no longer have any bad words for Outlook/Exchange thanks to Notes. But yeah I kinda miss Pine in unix and RiceMail on the mainframe.
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More reviled than passive aggressive staring, hyperactive listening, and the like?
I swear, there are people who use those as their primary communication mediaâŚ
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Difficult I can reluctantly believe, although IME even the most âI donât know how to use these newfangled gadgetsâ types manage to figure them out if theyâve got a high volume of incoming they regularly need to sift through to find the important stuff⌠But prohibiting filter rules? Thatâs utterly insane. Whatâs the putative justification for that?
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Doctrine of least privilege.
From a certain school of infosec policy, the best thing to do is to lock down the machine to the greatest possible extent. Even to the point of it being useless. Then grant the user the atomically minimum permissions one at a time until theyâre able to accomplish the set tasks they need to do.
If I were the sysadmin (and I didnât have to deal with the constant complaints and single-case permissions granting), itâs what Iâd do. Itâs already what I do with my own hardware. Iâve locked down my Windows 7 gaming rig to the point where itâs essentially a kiosk. If I need to install something, or clean the junkfiles, or run windows updates, or update my graphics drivers, or really anything other than execute a known-good game binary, I have to logout, restart in safe mode and login to the local admin account to do the maintenance. It works beautifully. But I do understand that most users arenât willing to take a couple of extra steps just so they donât have to worry about some Russian gang of thugs stealing their banking passwords.
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Thatâs a pretty big parenthetical. Might as well assume a spherical frictionless user in a vacuum while youâre at it.
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Least privileges doctrine works wonderfully well on kiosks and POS systems, as long as theyâre set up with pretty much bug-free end-user applications.
It also works well for server access. You give only the smallest amount of resources necessary to each user request.
But yeah, it never works in an environment where people get individual machines they become attached to. They always figure out a way to break the locks so they can execute programs or go to websites theyâre not supposed to.
One of my bosses spends an altogether inordinate amount of time connecting to corporate userâs machines via a backdoor VNC-type service that doesnât give itself away when you connect. He seems to get a lot of enjoyment snooping on people playing videopoker or netflix or using spotify (which I donât get, itâs a little bit of music and cuts the monotony), and blacklisting their machineâs MAC address. Wait 10 seconds until they call in, have them lug their machine down to the helldesk and ârun acrossâ evidence of prohibited activities. That guyâs a dick. If he really cared that much about security, weâd use something like Deep Freeze with automated reboots along with training the users to save to one of the corporate servers.
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Of course, wrt kiosks etc, but being able to plug your own thumb drive into a voting machine or having root on a server are orders of magnitude of privilege away from being allowed to organize your own email. Very few people working a cash register need full access to its guts, but everyone using email needs to be able to filter it. I mean, thatâs like disabling the Shift keys on all the keyboards and handling requests for punctuation and capitalization on a case-by-case basis.
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