Email still works, amazingly enough

 Intended for publication the week of June 21, 2009.

 By Brian Zinchuk

The other day I read a news story about email usage. Apparently, there’s a subset of email users who are daytime warriors – they send and receive almost all their mail during the day. This may be useful some day for spam filtering, because if you do most of your email during the day, odds are stuff in the evening is more likely to be spam.

Funny, I get email all day. Or so I thought.

Then I started analyze it.

During the day I might get up to 70 or 80 emails. I’m on several media mailing lists, so I get all the government and RCMP press releases, for instance. Then there’s work related correspondence.

My total intake is not much compared to some people I know, who get hundreds of emails a day. But it’s substantial.

Come 5 p.m., it all stops. I had never noticed it before, but everything just ends.

It’s even more pronounced on the weekends, when I might get two or three emails from Friday evening until Monday morning, when the floodgates open again. Otherwise it’s as dead as a doorknob.

In reality, my inbox gets a lot more email than that, but SaskTel’s spam filter works remarkably well, and what few spam emails do get through are often caught by my email client software.

This was a strange revelation for me, because email is a primary form of communication these days. It either means I have no friends, or they are now using different methods.

I’ve consistently used just one email address, despite having several. I do have one instant messaging software account – MSN, but that is soooo 2004, and no one uses it anymore.

I have steered away from Skype so far, but it may be unavoidable.

Now I’ve got Facebook and Twitter accounts, and for the first time, I have received an email, through Twitter. It’s a new form of messaging, with @somethingorother I have yet to figure out.  

Each of these accounts forward to my email.

Combined with text messaging on the Blackberry, it’s account overload. I can even get Facebook or MSN messages sent directly to the Blackberry. But why would I?

A lot of people these days use Facebook as a de facto email. I don’t know why. Maybe they feel spam has not penetrated it, yet. One of my friends who used to send daily normal emails now uses Facebook for most of his correspondence. What’s he going to do next year, when the next new thing comes along?

It drives me crazy.

While it’s the oldest, it’s also the most versatile form of messaging. There’s no 140 character limit, like Twitter. You can send it to anyone, not just other Facebookers.  

Some people thing change for change’s sakes is a good thing. But these limitations do not seem all that inviting to me. Yet to keep in touch with some people, you’re almost expected to have all these accounts. A new one pops up every year or so.

Yet email, warts and all, is still there. It may be collapsing under the weight of spam – 90.4 per cent of all messages now according to cnet.com, but it still works.

My friends may have migrated to other forms of messaging, but I still like my email. The question is, if I am no longer getting email outside of business hours, do I still have friends?

Hmmmm…. don’t answer that.

 

Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News (www.pipelinenews.ca). He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.

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