I’ve been using email longer than most people (more than a quarter of a century), so I think I have the credibility to say it’s overdue for an overhaul.

Email as we know it has considerable security holes. And of course we’re all sick of the straight-from-Satan’s-lair spam. But let’s not overlook how inherently inefficient it is. Once a boon to businesses, email has developed the annoying habit of burying information. It does this by piling up messages in threads; what you need to find is somewhere among the 30, 40 or 50 threads in a single email file, but who has the time to comb through them all to find that one essential nugget of data? We all know how this happens. Let’s say eight people need to agree on a meeting time. The emails come into the thread one after another as the time is negotiated. In the end, perhaps 97% of the messages are irrelevant, but there they all are.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

…