It's 2070, yet another attempt to replace email messaging has fizzled. You are stuck with an overflowing inbox and wonder why in your large organization to get anything done you have to "just send me an email about it". Emails to ask for permission, emails to inform everyone about new regulations, endless email conversations to settle on a place and time for very important meetings. Critical data files buried within compressed email attachments that get lost right before you need to take a look at them.

Even if today there is probably no better solution to a-synchronous inter-personal communication than email, there are many ways to use it. In this book we have collected many examples of incorrect, inefficient or simply strange ways of using email communication between human people working in large and small organizations. Despite the age of the medium (born in the early 1970s), these anti-patterns are still abundant across what we call email-centric organizations.

We hope that you will not recognize many of the email anti-patterns we have documented, but in case you do -- well, there is some hope. By giving a name to the problem, you start realizing a solution should and can be found. To reach it, you can take advantage of the distilled experience in these pages and read the suggestions that accompany each anti-pattern. In case your organization has already graduated to a data-centric or process-centric maturity level, be aware that the risk of ruining everything by taking the shorcut "just send it by email" is always lurking somewhere near.