Thursday 4 June 2009

22 problems with emails

Back in April I was giving a training in Lahti for Lappeenranta Technical University. I asked the students (people from middle management from several companies doing their MBA or Information Management studies) to share their email problems with me. The reason for asking is that quite many of the problems can be solved by using web2.0 tools - or just by using the emails with a proper style.

Problems with emails:

1. Emails are sent without a proper purpose and for too wide audience
->everybody has their inbox full of emails and they need clean it all the time
2. It is slow
3. It takes a lot of disk space
4. Paper wasted (! some people are still printing their emails)
5. The important emails are not noticed (e.g. everybody is now using the importance High)
6. Emails are hidden by spam filters (or rules)
7. Updating the delivery lists is a hard (and never ending) task
8. You need to wait for the answer (How long should you wait? A week, a day, an hour, 5 minutes?)
9. People are using emails with different styles, others are very formal and others chatty
10. Emails are not always protected and people feel too secured when using emails
11. People are "washing hands" by forwarding the emails (but I told you...)
12. Overuse of forwarding/cc'ing (your boss is not interested of everything you do)
13. Cc field: there are people who are ignoring all emails sent them as cc
14. Email may be sent to wrong people (e.g. there are a couple of Johannas in my office and we keep getting each others emails from time to time)
15. Someone may forward your message to people whom it is not meant
16. Long threads
-> it takes time to go it through to figure out why it was sent to you in the first place
->there might be something confidential in the message that you are forwarding
17. Answers to sender only - the others don't know what has been discussed
18. You can get rid of some delivery lists
19. Managing filters is painful
20. Attachments are clumsy when the emails are read from a mobile
21. Syncing the phone crashes if you have big attachments
22. Email titles are misleading (or missing)

Anything you'd like to add?

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