“Another way to look at it is this: I can classify all incoming personal email into three broad categories: (a) messages that are either very important or very interesting; (b) messages that are utterly non-interesting; and (c) those which fall somewhere in-between.
The vast majority of my email falls into the latter category. Under my previous ‘system’, I let them pile up in my inboxes, under the assumption that some day I’d get around to answering many of them. Under the new system, if I don’t respond immediately after reading them, they go right into my archive. Out of sight, out of mind.
I don’t consider what I’ve done to be a declaration of email bankruptcy on those old messages that had been in my Mailsmith inboxes. Rather, in one fell swoop I’ve done with all those messages what I should have been doing to them all along: archive them.”
Posted by Bill Keaggy on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Check out this visual over at XPLANE founder Dave Gray’s blog: “Language is more than just communication, it is the primary method by which we do things together. Language is the accumulation of shared meaning — on common ground.”
“All these years of internet use later, HTML mail still sucks. You may think I mean ‘HTML mail doesn’t work properly in some e-mail clients.’ And that statement is certainly true. Companies spend hours crafting layouts that may not work in Eudora or Gmail, or may no longer work in Outlook.
Even in programs that support the crap code used to create these layouts, all that hard visual work will go unseen if the user has unchecked ‘View HTML Mail’ in their preferences.
As for CSS, it is partially supported in some e-mail applications and in web apps like Gmail, but only if you author in nonsemantic table layouts and bandwidth-wasting inline CSS. Which is like using a broken refrigerator to store food at room temperature.”
Posted by Bill Keaggy on Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 9:02 am
“‘Email bankruptcy’ was a term I first heard in the context of Lawrence Lessig deciding to throw in the towel by telling everyone to whom he owed email that he was starting over (and that important stuff should be sent again).”
Posted by Bill Keaggy on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 8:21 am
“One of the benefits of using a dedicated email application like Apple Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird is the ability to send emails which included rich HTML signatures. These email signatures are easily recognizeable and often include hyperlinks, images, or a combination of the two. Although Gmail users could easily access their accounts via POP allowing for HTML emails, web-based users are were forced to use plain text signatures. For quite some time, I yearned for the ability to add a little more personality to my emails. Unfortunately, because I managed all my email accounts via Gmail’s web interface, the option was non-existent. That was until I discovered the Better Gmail Firefox extension.”
Posted by Bill Keaggy on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 8:11 am
“The message of Mark Hurst’s new book, Bit Literacy: In an age of infinite bits, time and attention are the scarce resources. The solution is to constantly manage your bits with the goal of reaching an ‘empty’ state. Hurst offers practical, opinionated advice on how to get to zero. Just like in his Uncle Mark’s shopping guides, he doesn’t shy away from taking a stand. It’s nice to read someone who says “do it this way” instead of being wishy-washy.”
“A short guide to what works and what doesn’t when talking to reporters.”
“It’s been just over 12 months since I posted our original Guide to CSS Support in Email and quite a bit has changed since. Sadly, the most significant of these changes was in the wrong direction, with Microsoft’s recent decision to use the Word rendering engine instead of Internet Explorer in Outlook 2007. We’ve written plenty about it already including an explanation of the reasoning behind it. More on its impact on CSS support later. It hasn’t all been doom and gloom though, a number of vendors have maintained or improved their support for CSS, especially in the web-based email environment.”
“Knowledge workers attend lots of meetings. We also have tons of loose bits of information that need collecting during the day. It all needs to be processed. To jog our memory, we take notes. Most of the time this is with pen and paper – unless your culture is laptop/Tablet PC friendly. Many aren’t. I use David Allen’s GTD system and now buckle it into Gmail as my sole collection bucket.”
“I had no idea that this form of spam existed. I ran ‘whois amazon.com, and got this…” (Thanks a.wholelottanothing.org!)
