just nate – code is poetry, life is code

If you hate email half as much as I, why are we all still sending emails to eachother? What gives?

I have many email accounts. I mean, LOTS. Like, maybe 50. They all forward or redirect into 5 addresses: two gmail addresses, a school address, and a yahoo address, and my work address. Between those 5 addresses, I currently have 1029 unread messages.

Not reading a message someone sent me several months ago is akin to just deleting it, but I have 1029 messages that I have never bothered to open. I get as many as 100 new messages per day!

Email has its place: collaboration, receipts, and the like. It’s a nice way to send a file out to a few people, and not allow the rest of the world to see it. Web clients like gmail even provide a cool way to real-time chat. But I am standing tall and proud on my soapbox declaring that we don’t need email for all the stuff we use it for.

You’ve got facebook, twitter, and (yuck) myspace for personal connections with friends, updates from companies, and even updates from online communities (like opensource communities, for example).

You’ve got yammer and google docs for collaboration. And don’t forget svn.

There are lots of other online apps that can replace various functions of email. All I’m saying is “COME ON PEOPLE!!! STOP SENDING ME EMAILS.” Is that so hard to understand?

p.s. I think voicemail is super crappy too. FYI.