The G Stands for Goodbye

Over the past few weeks I've been getting progressively worse connection quality from Google Mail (GMail). Then, as of yesterday morning, about 24 hours ago, it stopped working entirely, giving me a 502 error.

Now, this isn't the first time GMail has gone AWOL. About two years ago, I had GMail disappear for one day, then two, then three...and then it came back for a few hours, then disappeared again for about three more days, for a total of nearly a week. I even wrote to some high-ups I know at Google, but to no avail.

But those were presumably growing pains. This one is a bit harder to take. Especially when the error message says to try again in 30 seconds, but their support site says it's expected to be out until about 6pm Pacific time today—that would be a total of eighteen hours of outage.

Maybe you're stretching a bit too thin, Google.

This Eagle Feeds On Spam

When I got to Brown, I felt a grand opportunity to reclaim my mailbox from spammers. My Rice email address was all over the Internet, and this was in the era before even decent spam filters. So at Brown, I began to hand out unique addresses (using plus-addressing). At last count I had handed out over 202 distinct addresses, until I ran into too many sites that refused plus-addressing (and I stopped worrying so much about email in the first place).

Well, boy, was that a failure.

Over time, only one email address has ever been abused, and that too, only once. By corporations, that is. On the other hand, one group of spammers has made my mailbox hell by treating each of these addresses as distinct and sending me multiple copies of the same thing. Those spammers would, of course, be the most shameless hustlers of the Internet: academics trying to disseminate conference announcements. (I recently tracked down that the worst abusers are the logic programming community. And there seems to have been some innocent or malicious collusion with ETAPS 2006.)

So it was with some surprise that I recently saw spam addressed to a unique address I created all the way back in February 2004. And I was deeply saddened to see that it's the address I gave to my favorite hotel—the Adler—in one of my favorite cities, Zürich. That's right: a quality, discreet hotel in a city that pride itself on its discretion in a country that makes a living of discretion...sends spam!

For shame, Hotel Adler.

Next, my Swiss bank will be generating gaudy low-initial-interest-rate credit-card offers and selling my account information to florists.

NNTR / NN2R

Mitch Wand pointed me to this article by an email veteran bemoaning what has become of the medium. Obviously, I concur.

One annoying type of message that continues to throw me off my game is those brief “okay” and “thank you” messages, especially from staff. I've been getting increasingly good at anticipating these and affixing NNTR or NN2R to my preceding message. Amazingly, both the former and the latter are indexed in Web dictionaries, which makes me wonder why people don't use them more. [That's “No Need To Reply”, natch, not a Myers-Briggs indicator, though it might as well be.]

Anyway, I do, and I encourage you to as well.

Meanwhile, you ask, what do you do? I'm afraid I still send those replies to staff members, because I think it's just basic etiquette (though many a misplaced good intention has been born there...). I'd like to ask them someday whether they'd be offended if I stopped doing this and instead used that old classic from the days of Usenet: TIA (that's “Thanks in Advance”, for you wee ones).

Why Spam Will Improve English

As spam increasingly relies on misspellings, poor grammar, and poor punctuation to penetrate our defenses (one of today's message headers: “run don't walk to yuor broker” [sic]), the only email that will get through any longer will have to be perfect.

I Am Not a Spammer, I Am a Free Man!

Houston is an eccentric city. Its apparent mono-culture actually creates a remarkably strong and flavorful counter-culture, of which there is probably no more delightful manifestation than the Art Car movement.

Two lesser, but even more eccentric, attractions are the Orange Show and Beer Can House. And now, a twofer: the NYT informs us that the former has acquired the latter, melding the city's passion for eccentricity and capitalism. The article contains a key insight about Houston:

Marilyn Oshman, the art patron who founded the Orange Show, said it was no accident Houston played host to such attractions. “One good thing about not having any zoning is you can do stuff,” Ms. Oshman said.

The problem lies in notifying your friends of such events. I sent email to old Houston friends with the title “Orange Show buys Beer Can”, to which one responded:

I deleted this message as spam (but didn't purge) before I noticed that it was from you. I guess "Orange Show buys Beer Can" is more like the title of spam that I get than a typical legitimate message.

When the names of a city's museums trigger spam filters, you know it's doing something right.

My Slow Email Movement

I've never been a slow-anything person, other than riding slowly up mountains, and that's only because of the weakness of flesh, not any unwillingness of spirit. So it's not often that I embrace a Slow movement.

But on my Web page, I currently say

Every month I get over 10,000 messages. Of these, just over 8000 messages are spam. In this same time I send over 1000 messages. I am, in short, a full time email employee who gets to do a little teaching and research on the side. You know, as recreation.

If any of the deans or assistant deans or vice-deans or sub-deans or deans-in-waiting or deans-in-law at Brown are reading this: I'm kidding! Everyone else: I'm not!

For a day or two, I played with Google Mail on my mobile phone. Then, one day, I was lost during a bike ride, so I pulled out my mobile to find my whereabouts on Google Maps...and found myself checking my email. Soon after the apps ceased to work on my T-Mobile phone, and I was happy to not investigate why.

For the past year or so, I have rarely been checking my email when I travel. That is, I check it once every two to three days. And here's something amazing. If I wait a day, it takes me about an hour to restore my mailbox. If I wait two days, it takes me about an hour-and-a-half. If I wait three days, it still takes me about an hour-and-a-half.

These numbers are slightly misleading. They mask critical tasks that require real attention to detail and will take much longer than a minute to discharge. But those tasks are relatively few: I can be gone for two weeks and find only two or three such tasks lying in wait when I return. Which suggests I'm significantly promoting in importance things I do encounter daily.

There are other knock-on effects. You've played email ping-pong, right? Everyone treats their mailbox as a task-manager, so you get a task, you reply or forward to put the monkey on someone else's back, they do the same to put it back on yours, and suddenly you've lost an hour of the day (because studies haved, shown that these context-switches are extremely expensive, though as computer scientists, we should have known that). And, since you and your correspondent are both on-line, your reply begets their reply, and so forth. Congestion-control through exponential-backoff, anyone? (This is why I enjoy clearing out backlog during times when lots of people are on vacation: significantly fewer replies.)

The backoff strategy shows where our email user interfaces have gotten it wrong. They show us when we received email, but who cares; they should instead tell us when we should be replying to email. And that “when” should be a combination of when we need to (based on message content) and when it would be prudent to (based on correspondent habits).

So I'm making a conscious decision. I'm going to go Slow on E-Mail. I'm going to treat it as an addiction, like drinking too much coffee. There doesn't seem to be a simple, prescriptive or descriptive classification of addiction treatment akin to the seven stages of grief; much of the on-line material about treating addiction is rather disturbing and possibly borderline dangerous (and, mark me, there's a megachurch out there somewhere that is going to make a killing off faith-based treatments for email). So I'll have to figure this one out on my own.

Do feel free to drop me a note with your thoughts.

Just don't expect me to respond.