Posts Tagged ‘communication’

I realized this morning when I checked my email that out of the eleven messages that had passed Gmail’s excellent spam filters, only one was from someone I know. The other ten were what I would call “permission spam,” messages from companies and organizations I’ve given permission to send email to me. Most of them I bought something from once and signed up for email updates at the same time.

It looks like one way to solve the email spam problem has been to move to other methods of communication. Email is so frustrating. Between the enormous amount of spam (Gmail marked another 150 messages as spam overnight) and the way both personal and work email addresses seem to change fairly often (how many of you have the same email addresses you had two years ago?), email just isn’t reliable. When you can use a service’s lack of reliability as a legitimate excuse for not replying to someone – “I sent it on Monday, it must have gotten stuck in your spam filter” – it’s no longer a good way to do business.

We’ve moved to other services: Facebook (status changes, wall posts and direct inbox messages), Twitter, SMS/MMS messaging on our phones, IM and others. While the ingenuity of spammers truly knows no bounds, so far these services are proving spam-free and reliable. Even Twitter rarely has the downtime issues they experienced during 2008.

How useful is email to you today? What alternatives are you using to communicate with friends, colleagues and customers?