Many of the facile assumptions designers make about email are wrong.
The sanebox service, for instance, has the same wrong assumption -- that the problem is spam and unimportant emails.
The toughest problem I have in email management is important emails that are difficult to answer. For instance, before I took off for San Diego this week, I had to answer an email that required a prompt reply. This email involved an important relationship for which the circumstances had radically changed -- I wasn't sure what I wanted out of the situation or what I could do for the other party.
Given an email like that, my natural temptation is to put off dealing with them, so I have a plug of "important and somewhat urgent" messages sitting in my box at any time.
Spam and other unimportant messages, on the other hand, can be deleted in seconds, and pose very little cognitive load. If there's any real cost of dealing with spam it's that I have an itchy trigger finger and occasionally delete an email that I shouldn't.
The sanebox service, for instance, has the same wrong assumption -- that the problem is spam and unimportant emails.
The toughest problem I have in email management is important emails that are difficult to answer. For instance, before I took off for San Diego this week, I had to answer an email that required a prompt reply. This email involved an important relationship for which the circumstances had radically changed -- I wasn't sure what I wanted out of the situation or what I could do for the other party.
Given an email like that, my natural temptation is to put off dealing with them, so I have a plug of "important and somewhat urgent" messages sitting in my box at any time.
Spam and other unimportant messages, on the other hand, can be deleted in seconds, and pose very little cognitive load. If there's any real cost of dealing with spam it's that I have an itchy trigger finger and occasionally delete an email that I shouldn't.