From Email to (M)email

What's the biggest problem with email?

SPAM. Or to put it more positively, relevancy. Don't you find that the majority of the emails you receive, don't really matter to you?

I bet that 50% or more of the email you receive is either highly irrelevant or completely irrelevant to you, your job and your well being. At work, we're overwhelmed with email - to the point where we have to set aside time to "do our emails".

Industries have sprung up around spam control.

In a perfect world, we'd only want to see emails that we want to see! It's all about ME, ME ME.
Hence the term (M)email. I can't take credit for this term. I just heard it on a Seth Godin video. But the term really struck home.

So why is it that our inboxes are littered with messages we don't care about? Why has the practice of ccing the world on emails become so prolific? Why don't we respect each other's time a little more?

That's easy. There are no consequences for internal "spammers".

You know the type - send a message and cc everyone in the department and their bosses - just to cover all the bases. It's just too damn easy. But it's a tremendous time waster. Imagine each recipient, looking at the email, reading it, and then deleting it. Hours, upon hours, of wasted time over the course of a year.

There are loads of email etiquette suggestions out there, but they can't be enforced. It's like posting a suggested speed limit on a highway that's never patrolled. You get the idea. No enforcement=No rules.

So here's my suggestion. A Sender Rating.




For every email we receive, we need the option of rating the message relevancy (and therefore the sender), in the same way that Amazon buyers can rate the service of the sellers. A completely irrelevant email gets 0 stars. A highly relevant (or especially well written one) gets 5 stars. Obviously this would only work for everyone in your company's email directory (i.e. no outside senders) but it might make for an interesting experiment.

The sender rating could be displayed in your inbox along with the email subject line and could (over time) help you prioritize what you look at without having to read each message!

How careful might we be if there were (evaluation) consequences to every email we sent? Would we think twice before sending out those mass emails? Would we establish a CYA "penalty" for sending irrelevant (as determined by the recipient) emails?

What then, if as part of the annual performance review process, this rating figured in your annual raise? Could we change behavior to the point where Emails might become (M)emails?

It's an experiment I'd love to try.