1541: Reclaiming the Inbox

Oh my goodness, email. What a massive pain in the arse you are. And yet you shouldn’t be; you should be a convenient, quick means of asynchronous communication, and instead you’re a cluttered, nigh-useless mess.

At least my personal account is. So I’m trying to do something about it. When unnecessary mailing list entries that I never read show up, I unsubscribe with due haste. When my inbox starts to fill up with useless crap, I highlight it all and archive it — if I haven’t read it immediately, it almost certainly isn’t important to go back to in a few days’ time.

With a little coercion, I’m confident that I can start getting my inbox back under control. The trouble I’m having is largely due to the period of time where my personal email was also my professional email — while I was working on GamePro I didn’t have my own address — and consequently got signed up to about a bajillion PR lists. Subsequently, when I worked for Inside Network, I then got signed up for a bajillion more PR lists for mobile games and apps — and there are a fuckload more mobile games and apps released every week than there are on computers and consoles. (And approximately 2 or 3 at most worth caring about, if that.)

The reason I’m doing this is because I actually want to start using email again. When I think back to the early days of having an email address, receiving new messages was exciting. Spam was rare, and it always felt like an “event” to see Outlook Express pop up its progress bar and indicate that yes, messages were incoming via the magic of dial-up Internet. (Random, no-longer-existent free ISPs for the win. I was a “Hot Toast” man, myself.) This was because it was an event to receive a message — someone had taken the time to actually write to you.

These days, the former function of email is largely covered by social media — to a point, anyway. But it’s not quite the same, particularly with how much both Facebook and Twitter have wandered off from their original incarnations when they were first introduced. Facebook these days — even with my recently pruned feed — is nothing but links with people going “OMG SO AMAZING” or some other such hyperbole, while Twitter is inherently limited thanks to its character counts, and is becoming increasingly intolerable anyway thanks to the increasing regularity with which the social justice crowd continue to peddle their opinions and refuse to listen to anyone else.

Then there’s longer-form writing such as this blog, but that’s a broadcast rather than a personal message. Sure, I could write private password-protected posts and send them to individuals or small groups of people, but if I’m going to do that, I may as well just send them an email in the first place. It feels impersonal.

Which leaves email, as one of the most long-standing means of digital communication out there, as arguably the most practical means of actually getting in touch with other people — so long as you take control of it, that is. Going forward, my “good intention” is to try and use email a lot more than I have done in the past, perhaps to keep in touch with people I don’t speak to enough on a daily basis or even to get to know people I want to know a bit better… a bit better.

This is a bold plan, I know, and I wonder if it will prove to be a fruitless endeavour if everyone else has the same saturated inbox problem as me, but it’s worth a try. Email is a brilliantly simple but amazing technology that brings people closer together, and it’s wasted by most of us on a daily basis as we take it for granted. So I’m going to try and stop doing that. Maybe. We’ll see.

No you can’t have my email address. Unless you ask really nicely.