Skip to main content

Internal email spam and abuse

Nice, this is one of the reasons, internal email spam, why organizations are starting to use social software applications. "e-mail of the species deadlier than the mail?" - from confused in calcutta.

...misuse of e-mail is rampant, particularly via ass-cover and distrust-generating cc and bc functions; that internal official spam exceeds external spam, made far worse by our willingness to attach large presentations and spreadsheets willy-nilly; that all this will get worse, as more and more devices get connected, and then create more and more alerts. It's only a matter of time before someone decides to impose an - advertising model on enterprise mail and thereby fossilise the avalanche.

I still remember being seated next to Stowe Boyd, on a panel at Supernova many years ago, when he first called the death of e-mail, and how it looked as if some members of the audience would actually do him physical injury for his utterance. I wonder what Stowe would make of this article:

Headlined Office Staff Hit Delete in War on E-Mail Monster, the article describes someone who does a Chapter 14 on her mailbox, deleting her 30,000 unreads, only to find that they came back at the rate of 1,000 a day. It goes on to report on companies that have Zero E-Mail days, companies that included stalwarts of the Net like Intel. It talks about rebels being fined, about Wanted posters for e-mail miscreants, even about wearing the Scarlet Letter E.

Corporate social networking software pretty much gets rid of these internal email spam problems. They also help capture informal but important information that usually gets lost in email.