Re: Mail, not to be confused with spam...

On 30/11/2011 15:30, SM wrote:
> At 06:30 30-11-2011, Alessandro Vesely wrote:
> > There are already 500+ comments on yesterday's post on Slashdot on
> > "Europe's Largest IT Company To Ban Internal Email" [1].
> >
> > Is it because of spam that people stops using email?
> According to the news article, "only 10 per cent of the 200 electronic 
> messages his employees receive per day on average turn out to be 
> useful".  There wasn't any mention of "internal email" or "spam".
It depends what they mean by 'useful'

I get lots of emails from ZDNet, Computing.co.uk etc which are, 90% of 
the time, useless, but I subscribed to them, and occasionally there's 
something useful. It takes me 2 seconds to scan them and delete if 
they're not. I could easily unsubscribe if I wanted.
In a lot of businesses, no one understands the 'reply' button (just 
'reply all'), and they can never remember people's email addresses, so 
just email to everyone (just in case) - this works to best effect in 
companies of 1000+ employees - and they'll always forward messages about 
how you shouldn't open emails with 'hello' in the subject or your PC 
will explode, so it's not surprising that 90% of it is rubbish. Of 
course, people then reply (to all) saying please stop sending them 
emails, which starts a storm of everyone else doing it (replying to 
all), then people reply (to all) complaining that they are still getting 
emails, etc, etc.
(eg http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/The-Great-Cascade.aspx#298810)

Giving the IT guy(s) authority to patrol the corridors with baseball 
bats is as good a disincentive as banning internal mail IMHO :) 
Especially in an IT company... Unwarranted use of 'reply all' in an IT 
company should be a sackable offence.