Tech Columnists' Day Without Email

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "When a recent power outage disrupted email service at WSJ.com, our tech columnists were plunged backwards into a time before every meeting, every little task, came with an email-program reminder, and where checking the bottom right of the screen for a new-mail envelope was futile. "Some of us quickly got a reminder that email is the lingua franca of projects that bridge different departments and involve a lot of people," Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry write. "For all the talk of whiteboarding, it's email threads that we rely on to remember where we left certain questions and what our next moves are. Similarly, email has become our storage system for important documents and works in progress--how often do you email yourself? It's also replaced the telephone for lots of our routine touching base between colleagues, friends and families: Instant messaging is simultaneously too casual and too intrusive, and weekday phoning is reserved for more-substantive matters and emergencies. So a lot of that social lubrication went out the window.""

Re:Interesting story, just one question:

[Phisbut]

Um, how is email hardware?

It all started with a power outage... I guess you *need* the hardware to read the email...

Re:Interesting story, just one question:

[AviN456]

Well, all the email obviously must go through a server(s) at some point. If those go down, the email is effectively down. If the client computers go down, You could still get your email from elsewhere, but in an office setting, thats usually not feasable.

Re:That explains it!

[MustardMan]

Funny, maybe... but at the WWDC keynote just a few short minutes ago, Jobs officially announced the rumors are in fact true, and they WILL be going to intel.

Re:how often do you email yourself?

[Short Circuit]

I frequently email files to myself, or store info in drafts. And with 2.2GB of webmail mailbox space, it's very, very convenient.

It makes for an easy way to transport data from one locale to another without resorting to a USB pen drive, or other portable media. It also gives me a way to download a file once from a slow server, and store it on a faster one for when I need to retrieve it later.

Re:Social Lubrication is Good and All, But

[AviN456]

At my office, we use NET SEND to talk to each other. It has nothing to do with productivity though, we're just all nerds.

Re:Just the type of users who I like to avoid

[mibus]

1. MIME & Base64

2. Group emails get a copy of the attachment each in most mailservers

3. People don't usually delete old emails - if you're working on a file on a share, you usually might keep a couple of copies. With email, you'll usually keep every revision. (Usually once for each person in the email, plus the sender - see #2).

I'm as guilty of this as anyone, but I admin the mail server and we only have a dozen employees - almost all of whom use FTP and shares regularly.