Email Bankruptcy

I missed the blog entry that venture capitalist Fred Wilson posted last month.  The entry entitled Declaring Bankruptcy said:

Declaring Bankruptcy

I am so far behind on email that I am declaring bankruptcy.

If you've sent me an email (and you aren't my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again.

I am starting over.

Even if I saw it, I would not have been shocked.  As the CEO of a company with an anti-spam product, I hear about email glut all the time.  We all get so much email that we look for ways to cope.  Almost everyone I know has a personal address and a work address.  Some people use disposable addresses from Gmail, Hotmail, and others so that the email doesn't build up.  There are technological products for sorting messages.  For example, a few years ago I saw a cool product from Open Field Software named Ella for sorting messages.  (They have since re-positioned themselves for spam fighting.  That is much less interesting than content sorting.)

The difference is that "email bankruptcy" is designed not only to defeat spam, it is also designed to defeat the people you know.  You are deliberately putting yourself out of reach and making it more inconvenient for your friends and business associates.  It is penalizing them for your inability to handle your inbox. 

The term "Email Bankruptcy" is not new.  The Double Tongued Dictionary gives specific citations back to 2002.  (Double Tongued has a lot of credibility with me.  This site and the information on it are compiled, edited, and written by Grant Barrett, cohost of the NPR show A Way With Words.)  Internet visionary Lawrence Lessig popularized the term in his blog in 2004.

But, the major media is popularizing it.  The Washington Post reported in an article on Friday about the trend.  it cited many examples, such as, "Last September, the recording artist Moby sent an e-mail to all the contacts in his inbox announcing that he was taking a break from e-mail for the rest of the year."  With the Washington Post news service, the article has now been reprinted dozens of times in newspapers around the world.  (Wired Magazine also wrote about it briefly in August 2006, but that is not mass media response.)  Google Blog search lists 145 blog entries for "email bankruptcy" in the past month.  And, while the appeal is widespread, not all of the reactions are positive.

What worries me is that email bankruptcy will now become a legitimate idea to people who read about it in the newspaper.

"These folks either delete all the mail in their in box and start over or they announce piously to the world that they are no longer available by email, that they're dropping out of the most widely used communications medium in the Western world.  I think they're just rude. Particularly those who are choosing the first route of just deleting all pending email and "starting clean," blogged Dan Shafer in his blog One Mind.

There are many answers to email glut.  Another blog entry (Web Worker Daily) lists alternatives to email bankruptcy.  I listed just the top three bullet points:

• Just don’t answer your email.
• Delay answering.
• Use an email auto-responder that directs people to other channels.

I do not see the problem of email glut going away anytime soon.  But, moving away from your email without a return address is not the answer.