E-Mail, Dieting, and Chocolate

“He’s done it to me again,” Steve said to his wife Sara on a Sunday afternoon. She, Steve, and Marty had just finished having brunch together. “He’s got me chasing a rabbit. I’ve got four research projects and three books in process; a calendar jammed with workshops and consultations; and he’s got me seriously considering the possibility of collaborating on a book about e-mail.”

“It wasn’t exactly like he twisted your arm,” she observed with an ‘I’ve got you figured out’ look on her face.

“Of course not. I could resist that. He’s got my mind hooked— the same thing he did to me at two o’clock in the morning when we were roommates in college. He’d spin out this new perspective or vision of something, and I’d ignore the paper I was writing or the exam I was studying for and start chasing the intellectual rabbit with him.”

“Well, the two of you think so much alike that it’s probably dangerous. You got me pulled into it too. He threw out the idea, you started talking about how to develop it, and then all three of us were brainstorming book titles.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re going to do the book though,” Steve added.

“Yes it does. I know that look,” Sara replied.

And obviously we did the book. The fact that you are reading this makes you part of the dialogue that we started that day.

Electronic mail, or e-mail, is a relatively simple concept made possible by advances in electronic media which would have sounded like science fiction to earlier generations. Instead of using paper, we compose e-mail messages on computers and send them electronically to other computers. Those who receive our e-mail messages use an e-mail program to read them and, if desired, to respond to us. With computer devices becoming smaller and smaller, e-mail can now be sent using cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), or similar tools in addition to traditional computers.

Estimates of e-mail use are staggering and increasing all the time. The most recent estimate we’ve read is that over 150 million people use e-mail and send over 20 billion messages a day. One survey of major companies in New York City found that people were receiving an average of 80 e-mail messages a day. Those figures will be low by the time this book is in print. Current estimates are that 55 billion e-mail messages will be sent each day in 2007.

The CEO of an agribusiness sent an e-mail to all employees around the world to reassure them about anxiety over anthrax. He received a staggering 1,000 responses, which kept him busy for four evenings at home. Many people routinely receive over a hundred e-mails a day—some business, some personal, and some unwanted.

Steve sent an e-mail to a few friends seeking chocolate recipes for a booklet to be given away at a Taste of Chocolate event that was raising money to feed the hungry. He was seeking perhaps ten recipes; he received over two hundred, most of which were sent to him by people he did not know who learned about the search. Six of the recipes came from people in other countries! The recipes are still coming as this book goes to press, and you’ll find a few of them incorporated into the text. (We guarantee little in this book, but we absolutely guarantee these recipes will not help you lose weight!)

E-mail has become an important mode of communication for millions of people in large corporations, government institutions, small businesses, universities and colleges, elementary schools and high schools, churches and other nonprofit organizations, and private homes. Hundreds of books have been written to tell you about various aspects of e-mail. We’ve purchased and read many of them ourselves.

But not many books that we’ve read tell you in a concise way how to handle e-mail—how to make the most of it without being overwhelmed by it. That was the issue that started this project. Marty handles e-mail primarily through a university-maintained network with the help of Microsoft Outlook. Steve receives and handles e-mail primarily through America Online but has also used Eudora and Outlook Express. Sara works through a business-maintained network with Lotus Notes. All three of us have had times when we were swamped by the volume of e-mail we had to process. All three of us have returned to our workplaces from relatively short personal or business trips to find the e-mail messages waiting for us numbering not in the dozens but in the hundreds and even thousands.

The volume of unsolicited e-mail, or spam, has become truly over-whelming. Because e-mail is so cheap and so easy to send, huge volumes are sent by individuals and companies seeking to make money. It’s what would happen to postal service mail (or snail mail) if paper, printing, and postage were free to everyone. Ferris Research estimates that spam costs $10 billion a year in the United States alone in tiny bits of computer power and the value of wasted time, multiplied by millions of users. The Radicati Group estimates the worldwide cost at $20.5 billion.

E-mail is a tremendously powerful medium, but it can also be an overwhelming and even addictive medium. As we visited together during that Sunday brunch, we increasingly realized that we and many others need practical strategies for handling e-mail. It seemed that our electronic mailboxes, e-mail lists, and e-mail files were obese. We recognized that we needed to go on e-mail diets and get back to the place where we were in control of our e-mail rather than being controlled by it. In the process, we’ve also discovered many ways to make more effective use of the e-mail medium in our personal and professional lives. Now with the zealousness of those who have successfully gone through a dieting program, we want to share our strategies with you.

In our increasingly computer-oriented culture, there seem to be two categories of people who can benefit from the strategies proposed in this book. First, there are those like ourselves who spend much of their time working with computers and who embrace the technology (though not always without apprehension). Many of us work or volunteer or find recreation in settings where large numbers of people choose e-mail as a preferred means of communication. Our electronic mailboxes grow fat with messages, and we sometimes spend an unhealthy proportion of our days responding to those e-mail communications. We appreciate the power and efficiency of the medium, but we also feel like e-mail controls us rather than empowers us. E-mail causes considerable anxiety for many of us—anxiety about spam, anxiety about identity theft, anxiety about unanswered e-mail, and anxiety about e-mail keeping us from accomplishing more important tasks. We need a weight-loss plan that puts us in control.

Second, there are those who aren’t yet comfortable with computers in general or with e-mail in particular. Word processing, databases, spreadsheets, e-mail, the World Wide Web, and related applications seem intimidating. From the perspective of e-mail consumption, these persons are too thin and need some good protein-mix and high tech-carbohydrates to help them take advantage of the opportunities open to us today. Unfortunately, many people work in settings where it isn’t acceptable to say that they don’t feel at home with the technology, so there is little choice but to stay in the closet with their e-mail phobia.

We’ve written this book to help people in both categories. We believe that you’ll find this book characterized by:

• An emphasis on strategies rather than on every detail of every e-mail system on the market. Those details change, but the strategies can work for you for your e-mail lifetime.
• An approach to e-mail strategies that has much in common with some of the best approaches to time management and priority setting. Just as time management strategies strive to help you gain control over your time and schedule, we want to help you take control of your e-mail—to protect your time and also to help you harness the power of the medium.
• An effort to communicate in simple, straightforward language rather than esoteric, technological jargon. We know this runs the risk of irritating a few people who will feel that our language could at times be more precise. If you are in that group of people, we hope you will cut us some slack. We want this book to be useful to those who want the power and communication potential of electronic media but are not interested in the terminology or the technology underlying that media.
• An intentional plan to have fun with the dieting analogy. We’ll try not to get too cute as we proceed, but we want the book to be fun to write and fun to read. We’ll also make it clear when we’re serious about the importance of particular strategies. (And we mean no offense to those persons who have real eating disorders.)
• An effort to name and deal with some of the managerial and ethical issues facing companies, gov-ernment and nonprofit organizations, and networks in dealing with the growing volume of e-mail. We’ll talk about the ethical and practical issues related to spam (e-mail that you don’t want to receive) and phishing (identity theft) and offer strategies for handling these continuing problems.
• A desire to be in continuing communication with those who read the book. We’d like to hear from you about ways in which the book has been helpful and about ways in which it could have been even more helpful. Please let us hear from you at our website or at our e-mail addresses (put “e-mail diet” in the subject line):
  Website: www.emaildietbook.com
  Marty Siegel: martysiegel@gmail.com
  Steve Clapp: steve@churchstuff.com
• An effort to let you know when you may want to skip a particular section because it does not apply to you or is likely to repeat information you already possess if you are an experienced computer user. We’ll also highlight sections that seem to us especially important (though we hope you will want to devour every word of the book!).

At the end of the book are appendices containing some very basic information for readers who have little or no familiarity at all with e-mail or Internet use. Appendix A, “Understanding the Basics of E-Mail,” explains the steps involved in composing, sending, and reading e-mail messages, and a description of some common uses of e-mail. Appendix B, “Options in Internet Service Providers,” describes some issues that new users of e-mail and the Internet may want to consider when choosing a means for connecting to the World Wide Web.