Introduction

It’s 2070, yet another attempt to replace email messaging has fizzled. You are stuck with an overflowing inbox and wonder why to get anything done you have to “just send me an email about it”. Email to ask for permission, email to inform everyone about new regulations, email that lose elections, 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 email you have to send to yourself for making the big television screen show those nice pictures taken with your phone.

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, I am afraid too many, examples of incorrect, inefficient or simply strange or funny ways of using email communication between human people who are supposed to work together in large and small organizations. Despite the age of the medium (the first electronic mail ‘msg’ over the Interwebs was ‘snt’ in late 1971), these anti-patterns are still abundant across what we call email-centric organizations.

We sincerely wish that you will not recognize many of the email anti-patterns documented in this book, but in case you do – there is hope. By giving a name to the problem, you start realizing a solution should and can be found. To do so, you can take advantage of the experience distilled 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, congratulations! Still, be aware that the risk of taking the shortcut: “just send it by email” is always lurking somewhere near.