Business clients can be poor with the simple task of sending email

August 4, 2013 3:13 AM

Sometimes, it is hard to resist sending to a customer a link to last year's article What’s so good about email? from Rory Sutherland who, in his day job, is Vice-Chairman, Ogilvy & Mather UK. Elsewhere, Sutherland does not say too much at Twitter, but some links and remarks make him worth a follow. Some Sutherland thinking at TED is fun and provoking.
posted by Schroder (26 comments total)

Rory Sutherland does not appear to have learned of email filters. Pretty much all of the things he extols about paper mail are things I do with email. And here's one thing I find very beneficial about it: When somebody at work tells me verbally to make changes to a document, I ask them to put it in an email. That way, I have a record of what they said, which has proved useful on many occasions. They would resist writing their request on paper.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:29 AM on August 4, 2013 [15 favorites]

and the suggestion of setting a list of 20 categories is mindboggling. Now all your spam just has some extra random metadata! yay! Crazy ex-flatmate wants to get your attention? Use the 'from the government' category!
posted by kaibutsu at 4:33 AM on August 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

In his defence, his column in the Spectator is often an attempt to explain the modern world to the increasingly bewildered readership. Sometimes it's the only article in there which isn't swivelly-eyed nonsense bemoaning wind farms and the haircuts of today's youth.

Sensitive souls thinking of following him on Twitter should be aware he sometimes takes a Clarksonian delight in being politically incorrect.
posted by UnreliableNarrator at 5:25 AM on August 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

So, isn't the Spectator known for ignoring all manner of pop culture, or being dismissive of it? The use of technology would seem to be of a piece with that position.
posted by dfriedman at 5:38 AM on August 4, 2013

My List Of The Worst People On The Planet

- Hitler
- people who use email as a way to send you a phone number to call them
- Stalin
posted by DU at 6:00 AM on August 4, 2013 [7 favorites]

I sort of amazed that anyone get that much paper mail these days.
posted by octothorpe at 6:01 AM on August 4, 2013

I just threw up in my mouth. A lot. #joke
posted by Gyan at 6:59 AM on August 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

If emails could be pre-defined thematically, the gains to efficiency and happiness would be immense. There is already a working model for this – Twitter’s brilliant hashtag invention. the subject line.
posted by yeolcoatl at 7:06 AM on August 4, 2013 [11 favorites]

Honestly, I think Wozniak is about 100 years ahead of this guy in term of email. He refused to move from Eudora for years based on his life rotating around its ability to react to incoming email from certain people and launch scripts to perform certain actions.

I would say that I'm 100 years ahead of Rory Sutherland in this even. He's getting paid to talk about what would probably amount to "Lesson 3: Email Filters"?
posted by smallerdemon at 8:31 AM on August 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

Woz on getting things done from 2009 in which he discusses how he (at that time anyway) continues to use Eudora for email.

"The reason I do is, it has an incredible feature that every single mail client should have.

Any feature in the menu list, any action there, can be added as a button. I changed it so I have a vertical menu bar, so I can have tons and tons of pre-made buttons saved right where I want them up top, and I learn where those place are. You can script actions to the buttons, too, so I can quickly copy messages to my assistants. There are scripts I wrote for joke lists so I can forward a message, remove the brackets and formatting, and make sure all the original attachments are included, to a pre-defined "joke" group. Apple's Mail app just isn't scriptable enough to really handle my mail buttons.

Some of the buttons will re-direct mail with quote marks, or not. I've got another script that will actually customize a mail forward, like my own version of mail merge. So even if something's going out to 400 people, I can set it to single out certain people and take away all the forwarding markings, so it looks like I singled out someone to send them mail. Which is, I hope, a nice little moment for them. (Laughs)"
posted by smallerdemon at 8:34 AM on August 4, 2013

Rory Sutherland does not appear to have learned of email filters. Pretty much all of the things he extols about paper mail are things I do with email.

Maybe I haven't learned about email filters either, unless you're talking about the kind you can set up in your inbox, e.g. ones that file emails from mom into a particular folder. But those must be set up by the receiver, not the sender.

If my wife emails me and isn't careful about picking a good subject line, I can't tell if she's sending me a fun joke I can read later or a plea to call her immediately.

I can filter by key words, but I can't filter by subject matter as abstracted in author-created hashtags. Because email authors don't use hashtags.
posted by grumblebee at 8:35 AM on August 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

I think there are a few startups working on making email less painful. At least one is about auto-magically sorting mail into meaningful types (from boss, from immediate coworkers, from close friends, bills that need to be paid, newsletters you can prob ignore, etc). I can't remember the name just now, but it seemed like it might be a good idea.

If you could reliably put visual cues into email lists to indicate what type of thing each item was, that would probably be a good thing. In the same way that syntax coloring source code is good thing, though you can manage ok without it if you have to.

But the biggest problem with email vs physical mail is that we never used to get so much physical mail. If we got ten things in one day in physical mail, that was exceptional. As the guy says, that's because sending email costs next to nothing in time or money, unlike sending physical mail.

If we could figure out a way to charge people a tiny amount to send us email, that would probably zap all the useless noise. If it's not worth 3 cents to someone to send the msg, it's not likely worth the 3 seconds it'll take me to scan the subject line and hit delete.

It might even be a good thing to do internally within companies. If people got that their needless emails cost their company 50 cents per recipient in terms of work time used up, they'd probably think twice about what they send and who they send it to.
posted by philipy at 8:43 AM on August 4, 2013

Putting the onus on the sender of email is like relying on someone to back up their own files every day. Sure, it's great in theory. In practice, 1 in 100 (or less) will actually do this. If you're the one that does it, then it befuddles you to no end that other people can't do it. There's a reason we have so many automated backup solutions.

If you want this to work the way he envisions, you really have to make it simple. Almost thoughtless. You can't even rely on people hashtagging email. You need to basically reverse what Gmail does with analyzing incoming email for ads and have your client/server analyze outgoing emails for recipient and content and then start automating the send. Of course, there's a pretty human reason you really don't want to do this: embarrassment

People thoughtlessly use email now to send off quips and missives that just through sheer luck and trust of the recipient on the sender's part don't get them reprimanded, demoted or fired. Email's threshold of entry is low. Lower than snail mail. There is a lot to sending a real mail that forces you to have time to think through what you're sending. Not so much with email. Restraint is pretty much the highest level skill that most everyone is using with sending email right now. :)
posted by smallerdemon at 8:45 AM on August 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

Putting the onus on the sender of email

That depends on how things are setup. Consider flagging on Mefi... you can't flag without picking a reason, and it is very easy to pick the reason from a drop down.

There's still the problem (as indicated in the article) of whether the sender can be trusted not to exaggerate the importance of their msg.

To play with the earlier idea of charging people for sending me email, it might be interesting to have something where the sender has options depending on how badly they want to interrupt me and take up my time. Want my immediate attention? Pay $1 to have a msg actually ding me right now, marked as important and proving to me that it is deserving of quick response. Or pay 10c, and it will be auto-classified to a list that I check a couple of times a day. Or pay nothing, and it'll get auto-classified into a "Maybe Someday, but Probaby Never" category.

Actually I suspect a lot of us do this informally, e.g. treating an actual phone call as important and urgent, treating a text msg as a bit less important and not quite so urgent, and mere emails much further down the queue. i.e. If you really want to know the answer to something right this minute, you'll have to take the trouble to call me personally, and the fact that you take that trouble proves to me its worthwhile to take the interruption.
posted by philipy at 9:27 AM on August 4, 2013

But those must be set up by the receiver, not the sender.

Your paper-mail sorting system requires the receiver to interact with every piece received. Several times a week, I get paper mail that's disguised as something it's not - a timeshare marketing thing made to look like a personal note; an offer for vinyl siding pretending to be a job offer; an insurance company trying to look like the government. I have to open those to see what they are. If they were email, they'd go to the spam folder with no effort on my part. Many senders are not going to even want to let you in on what their message is about.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 10:04 AM on August 4, 2013

A good subject line and lead sentence does much more than expecting the sender to add hashtags or keyword or expect some other machine method to do this.

If the person who sent me an expects a timely response to an email they need to get to the point in the subject and lead sentence so it is what I see in the notification on my mobile or computer. If they aren't tagged as a priority sender and the can't get their point across in the notification window I may never get to it.

What google is doing with with the new inbox of separating types of messages by content is a start. I use my phone/tablet/computer to access my email though. When I replaced my iPhone, google took away my ability to use EAS for push email. Their solution is to use their app. But both gmail via the web or their app don't take into account that the user may have more than one account and desire a unified mailbox. They've made it easier to switch account but I still have to switch. I want one priority inbox for all my accounts.

I also like part of the Mailbox app's idea of being able to insantly file away emails to read later and if you filed something as read this weekend it shows you those emails on the weekend versus expecting you to check the folder yourself.
posted by birdherder at 10:08 AM on August 4, 2013

I have a professional distrust of people with bad email etiquette, most notably, inappropriate forwarding and CCing and a failure to review the inclusions before doing so. I've seen email chains get forwarded to clients which, if you scroll down, contain statements and information that the client should never see.

I associate this most strongly with salespeople, and learned to never email them anything that was not written with an eye to a customer reading it. If I need to tell them something else I will tell them on the phone.

Not knowing what you're doing can cost you. I have shut people out because there was no benefit to including them sufficient to override my distrust of them. Instead of the glass ceiling, you hit the stupid ceiling, and then wonder why you're not advancing...
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:15 AM on August 4, 2013

Want my immediate attention? Pay $1 to have a msg actually ding me right now

I really like this idea on one condition—that most or all of that dollar was paid to me. I wouldn't mind being interrupted by pay-attention-to me-right-now spam occasionally if I get $1 in exchange, especially if I have the option of not responding immediately and having it automatically downgrade to the 10c list. The idea of a system that monetizes attention in such an explicit way is really fascinating and very appealing if it pays out directly to the end user.
posted by metaphorever at 11:22 AM on August 4, 2013

In several respects email is worse than conventional paper mail. Letters come in a batch, once a day. They don’t follow you around the world while you are on holiday.

This one seems like he's just looking for something to complain about. In both cases, mail piles up while you are on holiday and there is no requirement to check your email from the beach.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 12:40 PM on August 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

A bunch of email providers are coming out with a feature that starts to solve the problem. Gmail now has an optional tabbed interface that sorts your emails into buckets — personal, social networks, newsletters, etc.

The problem is that they hide the bucket behind the tab and flag the tab with the number of new emails. So, first, the little (2) notification on the tab is nearly impossible for me to ignore and, second, there are times when I do want to read something in a hidden bucket (a daily events calendar for instance) but I don't know if that thing is what has arrived.

What I think we need is a multi-paned interface that primarily shows you your important emails but has panes on the side showing the top emails from each bucket. One glance will tell you if you're interested in what's just come in but your focus can stay on the main jam.

Get on it email people!
posted by wemayfreeze at 1:34 PM on August 4, 2013

Woz is/was a Eudora devotee? Somehow I'm not surprised. I mourn the loss of Eudora every day. I haven't found anything close to its power and customizability yet.
posted by litlnemo at 2:08 PM on August 4, 2013

smallerdemon, thank you for that selection. The intensely scriptable interface reminds me of the acme text editor, and it's something I wish we saw more of; at least bookmarklets in browsers get us part of the way there.

The thing about automatic email sorting is we've had it for ages, but it's only used for spam. The same Bayesian filtering techniques that catch spam for you can be set up to detect anything, such as horrible chain letters, your aunt's cat pictures, or mail from your bank. I'm kind of surprised it's taken this long to actually use them for this rather than people setting up complex sets of brittle rules or just doing nothing.
posted by 23 at 6:11 PM on August 4, 2013

Have just received an email with the subject header Re: Spring Campaign. Message content is about something entirely different. Commonly...creatives, field sales and some in marketing depts are lazy with subject headers with scant consideration for busy recipients; ditto, some finance directors. They will find an old email from you, think of something else, then fire it off to you. 'twas ever thus, we've worked with email at our end since 1996.

The fondness, above, for Eudora is most apparent. Wish I'd taken a second look years ago. MailForge Follows Ghost of Eudora Past says macobserver.com. Many favour Opera's inbuilt email as did I, although now wedded to gmail.

philipy's $1 idea, above, is fun and has merit: a European firm in the '90s routinely would levy a $1 fine upon staffers who did not carry with them a business card during the working day.
posted by Schroder at 7:09 AM on August 5, 2013

There is also still MailSmith.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:24 AM on August 5, 2013

I really like this idea on one condition—that most or all of that dollar was paid to me.

You could maybe imagine a startup that does mail sorting for you, and which charges the sender, takes a small cut, and passes the mail on with the required priority, along with most of the cash.

If someone not signed up with the system sends me a msg, they get back a response that tells them: "That msg of yours will be passed on this evening at 7pm. If you want it passed on immediately, sign up for our service, put at least $5 in your account balance, and we'll pass it on for a $1 fee."

Something like this might be quite useful in corporate situations. You could create an internal market for attention where people have to think about the costs of bugging their colleagues and underlings, and whether what they need is actually worth the disruption.
posted by philipy at 12:54 PM on August 5, 2013

The email startup whose name I couldn't remember is Inky.

I haven't tried it myself, not wanting to mess with my current setup or workflow, but some articles about it suggest it is promising: 1, 2, 3. One to keep an eye on maybe.
posted by philipy at 11:07 AM on August 7, 2013