My recent inbox contents:

- Friend, Learn to Play the Piano

- Save 66% on HP Photo Printers, Plus Manager's Chairs Only $49.99

- Your Life Insurance CO does NOT WANT you to know this.

- Your Commissions of $5000 per WEEK!

Email, Email, Email is coming to my inbox everyday by the hundreds. My inbox is like my street mailbox. If only the contents of email could be recycled. It seems as though fewer emails are personal and create a true conversation. Most email is junk mail or Spam. This is nothing new.

My expectation of email is exceeding the actual experience and that is a danger sign. Even when I send a personal email it seems most often that it goes unanswered for many days, weeks or never. My prediction is that email is now and will become more of a true electronic delivery box then a personal two-way communication tool.

We are getting deluged with email and most cannot keep up. When you cannot keep up, human nature is to procrastinate - or worse, just get frustrated. I can easily see how this happens as my inbox grows to over 1,000 emails and archived past emails totals 10,000. I am exceeding my capacity to deal with email. I am getting tired and that is possibly a bad sign for the fabled Internet Killer application.

The reason I am getting tired of email is because of email newsletters and commercial spam. It is not that the content of these emails is all that bad; it is just the overwhelming numbers of it. People must spend so much time sifting through junk email that they don’t have any time to actually find and reply to personal emails. This seems to be an unhealthy evolution online, but could be why we are seeing Instant Messaging grow and do so well. IM does a better job of email than email; it is truly instant and very personal. IM services know when you are online and notify everyone on your buddy or friends list.

The only way we can save email from its one-way delivery box fate is to inspire email client software to have much better filtering and automatic sorting. If the Internet Killer Application wants to hold back IM and keep its Killer Application title it must deal with email excesses and give me time to get personal with my email again.


~ WTG

(Rob Greenlee is-host of the WebTalkGuys Radio Show. WebTalkGuys, a Seattle-based talk show featuring technology news and interviews. It is broadcast on CNET Radio in San Francisco and Boston, on the web at CNET Radio, WebTalkGuys Radio, Sonic Box and via the XM satellite network and the telephone via the Mobile Broadcast Network.  Past show and interviews are also webcast via the Internet at http://www.webtalkguys.com).

PC World magazine names WebTalkGuys "Best of Today's Web Hidden Gems" in their August 2002 issue.