As I consider a move from G-Suite to a less spying laden provider, I am cleaning up my massive pile of email (a lot less of a mess than my significant other, I might add) I stumble across a lot of messages from mailing lists I have subscribed to over the last 15 – 20 years.
As an example, in 2008, I was considering buying a Mini, and during my research, I signed up for updates. I never did buy it, instead buying a far superior Honda S2000, but the emails kept a comin’ (I signed up for it so long ago, it was still an @mac.com address!)
So, when these come in, I am now going through the unsubscribe process.
Mini, GlassDoor, Seeking Alpha, and many many more were unsubbed. And the process continues. I did whittle my total email count from ~16k messages to less than 7,000 emails. By deleting rafts of messages that are not interesting. It was truly astounding how many of the daily NY Times headline emails I had in my archive (answer: Almost 1,000 that I hadn’t deleted.)
I have mused lately that it is time to move away from my G-Suite account(s). I have several of them, most are the old, no longer offered “basic” accounts (for a period of time, Google offered 8Gig accounts with 2 users, and totally free. These are no longer offered, but I had three grandfathered), and the real account that houses my personal email (my wife and I are the two users).
The tale of this domain (actually, the sister domain, tralfaz.org) has been told, a few times in these pages.
However, one tale I haven’t told is how when Google Apps became available, I moved from the creaky old email platform (hosted on a local Bay Area ISP, BEST Communications (an ISP that is so dead, I couldn’t even find an archival reference) probably in the 2005 or 2006 time frame.
Again, I find myself at a crossroads. Being a Mac person, and relying heavily on Google’s email products (I have 5 different email identities, all hosted on Google’s Gmail or G-suite apps), I must have a mail client that works well with the Google way.
Alas, the built in Apple mail client is okay, but on alternating releases they really foul up the way it works with the Google imap/smtp world. Not fail, but irregularities and some general suckage.
Word has it that in the new 10.12 MacOS Sierra it is good again. But I know that will change. Again.
About 5 months ago, I stumbled on CloudMagic, which seemed truly magic with the Google world, and its iOS clients were great too. But a couple weeks ago, they flipped their business model, and now it is $50 a year subscription. So I needed to switch clients. Continue reading →
Microsoft, Apple, Thunderbird (indeed, all MUA’s):
Time to kill/hide the Reply all option
It is time to remove the “reply all” option. I know that there are valid use cases for it, but alas, the general population has failed to grasp the implications of this seemingly innocuous button on their email. Yes, there are times that people really really do want to spam their colleagues like it was a listserv, but this is an edge use case.
Unfortunately, the idiots who populate the corporate and social world today seem to think that the normal use of email is to reply all. I have even heard them justify this by saying “If all those people were copied originally to the invite to meet for drinks on Friday, then I need to let them all know I am in.”*
Even educated, scientists who I work with have this affair with the reply all button.
Back when I was at Cisco in the early ‘oughts, we had these huge mail storms. People used mailing lists, and sent trivial status updates to literally thousands of people (good reason to limit distribution list access), to which many would reply “Please remove me”, of course this lead to a lot of other people replying the same, and suddenly you have an email thread with 500 replies in less than an hour, with absolutely no commercial value.
Time for the nuclear option:
Remove the button completely – yes, this makes life more difficult for people who have legitimate uses.
Make it available as a menu option – prefer buried a couple layers deep. I know this breaks my mantra of keep it simple and accessible. I am willing to make a tradeoff here.
If neither of these are attractive, then add a dialog box, particularly when there are more than 3 recipients of the original email, that warns people of how rude it is to spam their colleagues needlessly
Put some intelligence into the email application. If the topic is mundane, and there are lots of people in the “to:” list, move them to a BCC: to prevent the dreaded reply all.
Of course, the reasonable thing would be to expect people to have some common courtesy, and refrain from replying all.
The one bright light is that Gmail’s online interface, while I find lots of flaws with it, does this well. A user has to take an extra step to reply all to an email, and it does keep it down. Of course, if you download your mail into Outlook, that safety is defeated.
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*Yes, this email happened this week, and really annoyed the hell out of me.
