Just Use Email

You knew this was coming. Terence Eden who blogs at some weird URL called shkspr.mobi, but who is widely known and followed, goes on a small rant about stupid people who still fail to understand how to use the BCC feature.

He correctly points out that BCC is part of the original email specification from over 50 years ago. He is bewildered how people keep messing it up, even in corporate environments, even when they get fined for data breaches.

He then had to ruin my lunch by quoting some dimwit from 2005 who wrote a post saying that “email was getting out of hand”. Sigh… no, it’s everything that’s been showered upon us since that has gotten out of hand.

Then he says some other stupid people struggle to send files by email. I have no words.

Lastly, he wonders aloud if “we’re on the cusp of obliterating email”. Terence! Come over to Just Use Email and find some faith, my friend.

He ends by saying “I’ll admit, there are some advantages to email”. What? Some? Terence! (Sorry for shouting your name twice). Email has all the advantages. It has all the superpowers that nothing else has. Terence only lists one advantage: that the receiver can permanently store a copy of the received message.

He dies off at the end, writing that “it is hard to escape the conclusion that email is an analogue process in a digital world”.

First, email is not a “process”. If it is for you, you’re doing email wrong.

Second, email is the first widely-adopted digital communication method — and still the best — so it’s hardly analog in any sense of the word. Terence’s supporters pile on in the comments, but thankfully, a few stout defenders of email show up and make a small stand.

Where I really draw the line with Terence is a comment he makes to another reader who tried to put the blame on email clients. Terence replied saying “I fundamentally disagree with you. If a piece of technology allows for such mistakes, then it is at fault, not people”.

Woah! Do you hear that? That’s the sound of technocratic oppression. He feels we should let the stupidest people dictate technology policy. This is what breeds software picklists that don’t have the option we want. This is what creates horrific phone trees. This is what boxes people in.

So far, we’ve been lucky. When technologies try to protect us from ourselves too much, they tend to die out in a few years. Either people get tired of being boxed in, being told by technocrats that the tech can only be used in a certain way, or the developers get tired of trying to expand the original limited control (as they learn about life and different people) and realize they have to keep expanding the software, but still box people in at ever-increasingly levels.

This is the “Are you sure you’re sure you’re sure?” dialogue box on steroids. It keeps some stupid people from being stupid, but it eventually wears on regular users. And if you lose the regular users, you lose the market. Software for imbeciles has no market share worth capturing.

So, Terence, I fundamentally disagree with you. Ultimate power is available for us all. We want computers and software that do what we tell it do, not what our overlords tell us we can do. We don’t want endless warnings.

Technocrats believe we shouldn’t have the -f option on the ‘rm’ command. It’s just… too powerful.

There are probably some email clients out there that will warn you if you have 50 people on the CC line.

But what else should email clients warn about?

• Your photo attachment might be seen by the other party, its metadata examined, and your phone model and location identified.
• You might be getting an email today from a long lost friend. Are you in a good place to receive it, or shall I hold off?
• According to my programmers the ratio of your CC to BCC to TO recipients has inadvertently created a prime number. Are you wanting to create prime numbers today?
• Some of your fonts don’t meet modern accessibility standards. According to my AI hall monitor, your uncle is slightly color-blind and when you emphasized the amount he owed you in red, he may misread it and pay you the wrong amount. Fix it for you?
• The last time you sent an email to your brother about borrowing his car, he took 23 days to reply, leaving me, your email client, to believe he didn’t really want to lend it to you, but only did it out of brotherly obligation. Are you sure you want to send this same request again and still within two years of the last one?
• You are checking your email too often. Studies show it can increase anxiety and that you’d be better off being outside more, leaving your phone at home, and just accepting the fact that she’s not going to write you anymore after you left her at that party when you tore off with your drunk friends. I’m going to block you from checking your email more than twice a day because if I don’t, you might sue the developers for contributing to your anxiety. They programmed me to protect their own sorry butts, which haven’t been outside in years, because all they care about is control of others and deployments because their bonuses are based on it, and at least two of them are upside-down on their car loans.

Seriously, can we give it a rest? Email is powerful beyond any other medium precisely because it does not try to wrest control from its users.

If that means a few challenged folks fail, so be it. Such is life.