Having invented email, and the Spam that it generates, you’d think the North Americans would be a bit more savvy. Surely they don’t regularly open spam emails?

Well apparently they do. A recent study by MAAWG found that 1 in 6 North American email users respond to spam. 45 per cent of respondents said they identified spam by the subject line, and the subject lines they are thinking of are probably familiar to all of us. But 16 per cent of respondents open email, duped by the clever Spammers and their clever subject lines.   

While this survey shows that North Americans are gullible, we are sure that future surveys will find similarly gullible email users in other nations.  The reason why we are gullible is that Spammers have perfected the “doesn’t look like spam” subject line.  The classic Spam subject lines in my Junk folder now are: “Enlarge your Manhood”; “Your E-banking account has been suspended”; “luxury Items”; “For Limited Time”;  “Awesome New Products”; “IMPORTANT: Alert for your billing information”.  Where Spammers have got clever is in imitating subject lines we receive from trusted correspondents: “Re:”, “FYI”, “I thought you might like this”, “Fw: funny”, “Hi there”.  The point is that Spammers are leveraging off the fact that most of us write terrible subject lines.

Steve Kimmens

As organisations increasingly realise the popularity among their employees of using Facebook, and the fact that it provides an alternative email platform, more research is coming out about the impact that Facebook has in the workplace on productivity .

The latest survey, from Nucleus Research, is likely to rattle some corporate cages. The title of the research will provide a clue as to its key findings: “Social Notworking”. Among the standout headlines:
• one in 33 office workers has built their entire Facebook profile during work hours;
• the average office worker access Facebook for 15 minutes a day;
• 87 per cent of office workers have a Facebook account .

At Inbox Alliance HQ, we are hungry for data about Facebook. In our minds, Facebook generally divides the office team between the Gen Y’s (who organise their lives through Facebook) and the Luddite  Baby Boomers  who just don’t get it (guess which generation the author is in?).

The Nucleus research team draw some very interesting conclusions from their research. They argue that facebook is fast becoming an alternative to email. This will be news to many people over 30. They also argue that tech savvy email workers (read mostly Gen Y) realise that their corporate email and personal webmail accounts are monitored by corporate IT security.  Facebook messages are not monitored, so it an excellent way to circumvent corporate email security.

My thinking is that Facebook represents the famous Andy Grove strategic inflection point  of the future of email: the Gen Others are setting up a page, getting the Facebook emails, and switching off. Gen Y are embracing this medium and others that are emerging. When we are writing about electronic communication in 5 years time, we’ll be writing about the various types of IM and social networking platforms far more than we are about email etiquette on Outlook or Lotus Notes. I think the email workplace survey we are conducting will add fuel to this fire.

The only question that remains in my mind is what response we’ll get from corporate IT  to the Facebook (and others) “threat” (although that might be predictable), and how long before my generation innovates to bypass all those controls once again.

It is possible that if you don’t live in the UK, you might not have heard of Damian McBride. Damian has provided the best example of why the email rule – “if you wouldn't want it printed on the front page of a newspaper then don't send it” – was established. Damian McBride was a senior advisor to the current British Prime Minister (Gordon Brown), and stands guilty as charged of sending emails designed to smear senior member of the British Opposition. While the news story is old news (April 2009), a fascinating interview with him is to be found in the Guardian newspaper.  McBride is quoted as saying, “As far as I was concerned, those emails went in the bin shortly after they were written … and that's where they should have stayed.” They weren’t. Few ever are.

Incriminating emails are unfortunately to be found littered through most people’s Inboxes. As a fine example, the other day I received a rather presumptive email from an Australian colleague (I’m English living in Australia), claiming that the English cricket team would be “smashed” by the Australian team in an upcoming Ashes Test Match. (These matches make the term “grudge match” seem pedestrian.)  The email was colourful, made various very unflattering and barely legal comments about a number of key players in the English team. The tone was outrageously confident.

As it turned out, England won the match easily. The email has been returned with interest. Having hit the send button with glee, I’m now wondering whether this email will get me into trouble in two weeks time when the teams play again.

We are searching for examples of similiarly ill-timed emails. Any contributions?

Hold the front page: a recent study has found that poorly written emails are painful, time-wasting, and stressful. This is something most of us probably already knew, but it is comforting to know that it isn’t just us being individually grumpy – it’s a trend.

The study was among a group that you might imagine could write a decent email – academics at an University. I haven’t seen the detail of the study, but have monitored the media coverage. Just over 200 people were involved in the study. The reports’ author, Rowena Brown, says “feeling stressed, overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted are other common strains caused by emails.” Right.

Most interestingly, the same study uncovered a mighty contradiction. It found that the more emails arriving in a person’s Inbox, the higher that person’s job satisfaction.

Why might this be? One implication could be that the volume of email an individual receives is an electronic badge of honour. Another, that we all crave being connected with people, and the more email that arrives the more connected we feel. Further, the more email the more important we feel.

I have to say that the amount of email I personally receive is something I am neither proud of, nor enjoy, and I feel it often stops me connecting with the people I want to connect with. My daughter, on the other hand, tells me when she doesn’t receive much email in a day that’s “a bad day at the office”. And she’s not talking about Facebook, either.

In preparing for our own study of email usage habits we have received the much the same anecdotal feedback about email from our survey design test group. On the one hand our testers complained about the volume of email causing them stress; on the other hand, they felt pretty unloved if they didn’t get lots of email.

There does not appear to be much hard evidence out there as to what a “large amount’ of email per day actually means.

In our scan of the web for surveys about the volume of email usage, which has taken several weeks, there are numerous mentions of “recent research” showing “typical users” who receive “about X” number of emails a day. But we have struggled to find the actual primary research these mentions are based upon. (Any hints on where to find them would be most appreciated.)

As interesting is the wide disparity in the average number of emails these mentions claim a typical user receives in a day – anywhere from 50 to 250 according to the quotes we have seen (but usually without citations).

Given email is probably the #1 means of communication by knowledge workers at their workplace, the number of large-sample research studies seems very low.

Which category of email user do you fall into? Stressed or satisfied, or as the research suggests, do you have a foot in both camps? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Alistair Gordon