Sam has written a post on his blog discussing the dumbness of email…
Email is dumb in the sense that the content of a particular message is subject to the interpretation of the person receiving it. While you know things such as a) who sent the email b) the date and time it was sent, really the crux of the message is not necessarily clear. People are notoriously poor communicators and in today’s multi tasking environment, particularly poor readers.
While the dumbness of email doesn’t matter much when email is being used for social communications, the lack of ‘intelligence’ in email really starts to matter when we’re talking about work. Deadlines. Action items. All critical to the success of a project – and our careers.
How many times have you emailed someone only to learn a week later that they ‘overlooked’ something you had asked them to do? How many times have you searched in vain, even with advanced systems like Gmail, to figure out what was assigned to you? Or how about when an email chain contains multiple changes to a deliverable’s due dates? Who changed the date and why again?
Email is not intelligent in that it lacks the ability to recognize and translate grouped text into action items. Microsoft Outlook, or iCal offer a slightly more intelligent approach. [For the full-post click here]
For other great thoughts on the failures of email check out this post by Tantek Celik:
The usability of email for me has deteriorated so much that I exclaimed on Twitter recently: EMAIL shall henceforth be known as EFAIL