ALKHOBAR, 29 August 2006 — My e-mail is under control. That delightful situation only happens once a year in August. While my e-mail server going down causes me grief, e-mail itself can create considerable stress, so managing my e-mail efficiently is a must. Honestly, I actually enjoy reading most of my mail and consider e-mail a wonderful innovation. Unfortunately, I have serious issues with the messiness of the e-mail process.
I recently made a decision to switch e-mail accounts to help reduce my stress. For years I have enthusiastically supported Maktoob.com and used their e-mail as my public mail address. But in the last year it became increasingly painful to access my Maktoob mail. First, I would have to reach the English Interface of the site. Then I’d have to log on. Next, I’d have to request to view my inbox. All the while I would be bombarded by advertising. Designers at Maktoob move around the “close” buttons on the advertisements so the ads can’t be turned off easily. This makes it difficult to quickly get rid of the ads. Generally, an ad comes up on top of the logon box, interrupting the sign-in process. An advertisement always comes up again before the redirect to the inbox. Reaching my Maktoob mail account became a slow, frustrating experience — even more so if I happened to be using a dial-up connection.
That’s why at the beginning of this summer I decided that it was time to switch to Gmail. I hated abandoning a mail service that was designed, owned and operated by a company in the Middle East, but Maktoob got greedy. I wouldn’t have minded if the ads on Maktoob ran as banners on the pages, but forcing me to wait to sign in while an ad covered the logon box was inconsiderate. Sometimes Maktoob’s ads came with hideous sound effects or bizarre graphics as well, which may have appealed to 15-year-olds using the site, but were exasperating to sit through, especially several times daily at logon.
Gmail is easy and straightforward to use. I have customized my Google home page so that a variety of content including search and e-mail is always visible. I’ve got 3GB of storage at Gmail and their servers work well in any geography. The mail comes up fast and there are no advertisements to struggle through to reach it. Even better, at Gmail I’m not spending time killing spam. Maktoob’s spam detector does a poor job of handling spam. This means that on the first pass through my Maktoob account, I would have to select all the spam mail and mark those for deletion and then go through the inbox again and mark e-mail that were duplicate copies of mails sent as backups from various business contacts. Spam is better controlled at Gmail and that’s a big plus.
Some readers who noticed that I made the shift to Gmail wrote to me concerned about how the people at Google were probably analyzing and perhaps even reading my Gmail. The truth is that e-mail isn’t private. Even with encrypted mail there is still a strong possibility that some government agency somewhere is analyzing that e-mail. When an e-mail is sent out it doesn’t travel like a non-stop airline flight from Point A to Point Z. E-mail is usually more like a direct airline flight from Point A to Point Z. There are lots of connections through servers along the way. Each SMTP server on the route from Point A to Point Z holds a copy of that e-mail.
Most of the stuff in our lives, while important to us, is extremely boring to everyone else. Unless you’re a terrorist, head of state, CEO or movie star, nobody is interested in your e-mail. Sensitive, confidential information should never be sent by e-mail. I operate on the principle that someone, somewhere is analyzing all my communications. If the staff at Google want to join the crowd, all I can say is, “welcome to the party.”
As I sifted through all my mail this summer, I noticed a few trends. Loads of people have begun sending out e-mail without subject lines. This is extremely annoying and makes the mail hard to locate if it’s needed for later reference. If I am sending out a short e-mail, sometimes I can enter all the needed information in the subject line. Then I add the words “body blank.” My frequent contacts know that this means there is nothing further in the body of the e-mail. Basically, they don’t need to open it. This works well and saves time if someone needs a telephone number, name, date or other small piece of information. I can also note in the subject line if a mail can be handled at leisure. This is appreciated by busy corporate contacts who might be traveling. There are many ways that the subject line can add value to an e-mail; left blank, subject lines just become black holes.
I also noticed that before leaving on vacation this summer, many people did not turn on the “out of office notifications” on their e-mail systems. Basically, those people just dropped off the planet and abandoned their responsibilities. Officials in the government sector, public utilities and even some executives in private companies were guilty of this behavior. In some cases, the only indication there was that an official or executive had gone away, was that eventually the mail server responded, “mailbox full.”
Recently, as people returned from vacation, I started receiving phone calls and e-mails, in response to my long unanswered e-mails, that began, “Sorry, but I’ve been away.” I haven’t been very understanding on this issue. There is a perception that the entire population of Saudi Arabia goes out of the country during the summer. That is not true at all. Millions of people were here during the months of July and August. Increasingly, government agencies and public services prefer to be contacted through e-mail and other online means. All government employees and staff at public utilities should be instructed on how to use the “auto reply” on their e-mail systems so that the public can be advised when these individuals will return to their duties. It is too much to hope that someone else would be designated to handle their e-mail and online correspondence, but at least with “auto reply” everyone would be informed of the situation.
Receiving e-mail is actually only one part of the struggle these days. I get dozens of mails weekly that have bizarre attachments. What would you use to open a document with the file extension “.max?” There are companies, too, that take html grabs, save them as word documents and then expect them to be readable in a variety of IT environments. How many file viewers must a person download to keep up with this trend? Please, everybody, consider using straight text in e-mail and when that’s not possible, make Portable Document Format (.pdf) the file type of choice for widely circulated documents.
Last, but not least, for all of you who are sending out e-mail to advise all of us that you have returned from your travels afar, for goodness sakes use “blind carbon copy (bcc)” in listing all our e-mail addresses. The only thing that will make everyone dislike you more than knowing you managed to get time off to enjoy yourself in a delightfully cool, relaxing locale is exposing the e-mail addresses of those of us who were stuck here all summer long in the heat!
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