2,433 Unread Emails, I feel your pain..

This gem of a post recently popped up in my Techmeme/TechCrunch RSS feed. its Michael Arrington lamenting the hassle/aggravation/frustration of having to deal with a daily onslaught of thousands of emails.

Michael, I feel your pain. Making my email readily available seemed like a really smart thing to do when I first bought the Mavs in 2000. In hindsight, it was a huge mistake. Now of the thousand plus emails I get in a day, a hundred may be of the "You Suck" variety. Another 100 or so are of the "I want " variety. I would say that less than 20pct of the emails I get in any given day are truly of any interest and value to me and 99pct of those are from employees.

The good news is that I have a filter system setup so that I can push emails from people I already know or do business with into folders that I know are of relative importance.

Yet, I still trudge through the emails from the sports people who want to rant for the sake of ranting, giving them the shortest of glances, just in case they truly are a customer of the Mavs with a valid issue. I still glance at the "I want" emails, just in case there is something of truly redeeming value.

Unfortunately, there is one element of email that I have been forced to give up on. I have emails going back to the 1980s. Starting in about 1994, I have as many emails as I have been able to save as possible, up until about 12 months ago.

I had always wanted to keep each and every email I ever got figuring that it would be a history of my life that my kids and their kids could look back at just as I loved to look at old postcards, letters and pictures of my parents and grandparents. I kept as much as I could. I would estimate that I am well past 1mm emails in aggregate to date.

But as people got broadband, they started sending bigger and bigger attachments. So the attachments were the first thing to go. Then as people added mobile email, the volume exploded. Everything became email worthy. Which took my email files to sizes they have never been before. In fact, the biggest hassle in dealing with all of this is the 4gbs limit to copying files in Windows platforms. Zipping works, most of the time, but not all and the not all times make it not worth risking

So I started breaking them into smaller and smaller files, which just made things harder to manage and find. Even with indexing software out there.

And as far as moving everything over to my mac ? Entourage ? Setting up rules in Entourage or any mac mail i have tried takes an eternity. Try recreating more than 1k rules. Even trying to set them up as they come in hinders my productivity to an unacceptable level. So now I survive with my Windows Mail Server Box and my laptops taking in only current email.

So Michael, I feel your pain. The idea of living "The Email Life" worked so well for so long. Now, each day I say goodbye to my little email friends, I feel like Im cheating the future.


So now I just keep what I need to keep. HDNet, Mavs, 2929 stuff that I need to have available for reference.

Its kind of disapp

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