Actress Kristin Scott Thomas made an interesting observation the other day while discussing foreign language films:
"People will now go to films with subtitles, you know," she added. "They're not afraid of them. It's one of the upsides of text-messaging and e-mail." She smiled. "Maybe the only good thing to come of it."
The abundance of scrolling tickers on CNN, ESPN, and CNBC may be even more of a contributing factor...if in fact people are more willing to see films with subtitles. (via ben and alice)
Inbox Victory: take a photo of yourself and your mail program when you get your inbox down to zero items.
If you Google "email me", kottke.org is the first result. This may explain all the spam I've been getting. (via two separate most-likely-drunken emails last night)
Permanent Vacation, a piece by Cory Arcangel consisting of "two unattended computers send endlessly bouncing out-of-office auto-responses to each other". (via vitamin briefcase)
Has anyone else noticed that Mail.app and IMAP aren't perfect playmates in Leopard? The unread counts in my folders don't update until I click on them (and my inbox unread count never updates), which is suboptimal and time consuming in the extreme.
Merlin Mann on the temptation of declaring email bankruptcy:
Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn't take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that's taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can't handle that one tiny thing. "What 'pile'? It's just a fucking pebble!"
This used to be a problem primarily for those, like Merlin, who run high-traffic web sites but now I feel like most people, either because of their jobs or keeping up with friends & family from far away, have email pile problems...we all get more incoming correspondence than we know what to do with.
Email bankruptcy: "choosing to delete, archive, or ignore a very large number of email messages without ever reading them, replying to each with a unique response, or otherwise acting individually on them".
David Shipley and Will Schwalbe have written an email style guide, an Emily Post for the cubicle set. I can't abide by the endorsement of excessive exclamation points, but maybe the rest of the book is more useful? Send is available at Amazon.
An HR department looking for someone with internet experience dumped emails from candidates with Hotmail email addresses because "you can't pretend being an internet expert and use a Hotmail account at the same time". (via bb)
Tom Hodgkinson has given up on email. "At the weekend I set up one of those auto-reply messages, informing my correspondents that I would no longer be checking my emails, and that instead they might like to call or write, as we used to in the olden days."
Update: Stanford computer science professor Don Knuth stopped using email more than 15 years ago. (thx, dan)
Apparently, signing off your emails with "Best" is "something close to a brush-off". I sign most of my emails with "Best", especially when I don't know the person particularly well, and I definitely don't mean it as a brush-off. "Sincerely" is too formal, "Warmest regards" is a lie (you can't give absolutely everyone your warmest regards), and "xoxo"...I'm not a girl. So "Best" it is...don't take it the wrong way.
Why the functionality of MsgFiler isn't automatically built into Mail.app, I don't know, but I'm definitely coughing up the $8 on this because my life primarily consists of moving email from one folder to another. (via df)
Update: See also Mail Act-On. (thx, brandon)
I'm currently testing out this rule for filtering image spam messages with Mail.app. I'm hoping it works because all of the unfiltered image spam clogging my inbox is slowly killing me. Not sure it's going to work though...because of kottke.org, I get a lot of email from people who have not previously contacted me. (via matt)
Check out all of the chrome in the new version of Outlook. Good grief. Even the veracity of the emailer's claim is questionable.
Sorry for the lack of updates...we've been having some trouble with the internet and I've been wrestling with my email for the past two days (I finally pinned it in the 8th round). If you sent me mail, I think I got it, but expect a slower than normal response...most of it will probably wait until I'm back in the States.
Been doing some reading up on Vietnam (we're heading there in a couple of days). I'm finding that Wikipedia (Vietnam, Vietnamese cuisine) and WikiTravel (Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City) are good sources for the 50,000 view of things, taken with a grain of salt. The guidebook is better, but it takes a lot longer for you to get the gist. Reading Wikis Pedia and Travel and then the guidebooks seems a good strategy.
Also, we've been Flickring photos while we're in Asia (thank you T-Mobile for finally fixing my International Roaming), check out Meg's and mine for off-blog goings-on. (Completely off topic, here's some Flickr photos tagged "comic sans".)
Responsible spam messages. "Can't SATISFY your woman? Perhaps the two of you should sit down and discuss the issue."
Merlin's excellent advice for writing sensible email messages. This one is excellent advice for email and blog comments: "Emails to a thread are like comments at a meeting; think of both like your time possessing the basketball. Don't just chuck at the net every chance you get. Hang back and watch for how you can be most useful. Minimize noise."
Justin's looking for the largest inbox smoothly handled by Mail.app...the current high is 26,700 messages. Mine only has around 100 because I filter most messages into a variety of folders. Update: he's up to 43,000 283,686! (That's gotta be on a G5 with a ton of RAM...my Powerbook would melt under that kind of weight.)
This is odd...you need a mobile phone to sign up for Gmail (or get an invite from a current user). Well, I guess that's not a whole lot more strange than needing an email address to sign up for an email account.
When dealing with information sent to them on mobile devices like the Blackberry, people tend to not read anything that closely and seem to take the information less seriously. Like Matt and Foe, I've noticed this...but with blogs and (especially) newsreaders. Having 1000s of unread items to deal with per day would tend to diminish the value of individual blog posts, n'est pas? I wonder if this is partially what Gladwell is getting at with his upcoming NYer festival talk, The American Obsession with Precociousness, Learning quickly versus learning well...
Visualization of email archives as a mountain with layers. "Each layer in the Mountain represents a different person. Layers are ordered by time, with the first people in the email archive at the bottom and the most recent people in the archive at the top right portion of the mountain."
The Daughters of Freya is a serialized email mystery. "The mystery is told through emails exchanged between journalist Samantha Dempsey and the other characters. You'll receive a few emails at random times every day over the three weeks that it takes for the mystery to unfold."
