Friday, September 18, 2009

The End Of Email

I blogged about it a few weeks ago in a different context. But I'd like to shed more light on the dieing email technology. Yes, yes, yes, It will live on for a long time - but it's the end of it's relevance - and therefor eventually die.

My email account receives on average 36,000 emails a month. About 30,000+ are filtered by the server based spam filter. I don't even notice those 30,000 - other than in a mail server log file saying - deleted 31,074 spam emails.
From the remaining 6,000 email about 5,000 get filtered by my local spam filter. So I end up with about 35 emails per day of which 50% I still care less, 15 - 20 may be informative and 5-10 are real important.
In other words 0.5% of the email volume is important.
Or: 99.5% of emails are a waste of bandwidth, wast of money as I need to buy and maintain spam filters. It's a sad illusion for customers who trust marketers that they can "deliver the message".
OK - I get more than 5-10 important messages a day - much more but I get them through different ways. People contact me via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter direct messages, text me, skype me and so forth. Only 20% of what is relevant to me comes through email - and steadily declining. Friends, customers and peers know - if something is REALLY important they skype me.

Now - you may say but if 5-10 are very important you can't throw it over board. Right ! But it tells me that there will (hopefully soon) somebody come up with a cool new idea to get those 10 important messages to me without all the overhead of spam and filters.

I look forward to the day I can announce that I no longer use email - which I predict will happen within the next 18 month.

Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS

3 comments:

Wendy Soucie http://www.xeesm.com/wendysoucie said...

Chris Brogan had a post in the last 2-3 weeks about how email still has value to your existing clients. I have to agree with him on some of that.

However, I did make note of the 100 emails I received today, I actually immediately deleted 50%, looked at subject and preview of 25 more, but only acted upon or fully opened the last 25. Some of those were just copied to me on a project.

Skype might have eliminated some of this chatter I agree. I would prefer to get less, but I have also lost some things in readers since I don't have a solid process to read those regularly.

This gets me thinking however.

Anonymous said...

Having the Skype name "walter" I get about 100 spam calls and contacts over each 3 days or so. Skype lacks a spam filter so I have to sort it out manually. My ratio of useful calls on Skype is unfortunately much lower than 1%.

Walter Adamson @g2m
http://xeesm.com/walter

Axel Schultze said...

@Wendy - Of course Chris Brogen need to say that as he is a marketing consultant and despit his social media presentations still makes money with traditional marketing ;-)
@Walter - I use Skype so that nobody othe than friends can contact me. And I give my skype account only to those I work with. As such I don't need a spam filter. Maybe a setting?

Axel

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