To the point: You got mail

Even if the Viennese philosophy professor Peter Kampits states culturally pessimistically that the Internet has brought about a dramatic loss of reality and thus a downright cultural decay. And Kampits also knows who the culprit is: e-mail. 

I agree with the professor: the flood of e-mails is the daily crux. Thanks to better and better filters, the flood of unwanted spam mails has decreased drastically. Less and less often you get an email from an illegitimate son of a Nigerian ex-minister who wants to give you a share of his 15 million $ fortune, also the request REAL FIAGRA lands less often in your inbox. But it is not about this kind of mails, it is about the normal daily business mails. The fact that you can delete unwanted mails on the go thanks to the iPhone only makes things a little better.

Sascha Lobo, author, blogger, microblogger and strategy consultant specializing in the Internet and brand communication (that's him with the fiery red shakiri hairdo) takes this as an opportunity to ironically give "17 tips against the flood of mail". His comments on Spiegel online are amusing:

"Sporadically interspersed careless errors indicate a listless or hectic sender and thus reduce the recipient's mail enjoyment, which usually has a favorable effect." I also really liked tip 12: "In the age of the smartphone, you take into account the poor people who have to mail from the road. This can also be exploited at the desk; the impression of a mobile-composed e-mail is achieved by confused errors, consistent lower case and the attached greeting formula 'freundliche grüsse vno unterwegs'. Only very unpleasant people will start a lengthy mail dialogue with a person who is apparently forced to write mails one-handed with a weak battery while walking hastily." I also like: "With each additional mail recipient the probability of a reply mail increases. If it is impossible to avoid including others for political or social reasons, one should put as many recipients as possible in cc. Mails in cc dramatically reduce the perceived obligation to respond."

Today at 14.34 I received one mail. At 15.12 I had seven mails about the same thing. Always cc, direct recipients there were two to three depending on the sender. Then in the last mail the knot was loosened. How was that with the culture decay?

Pierre C. Meier, Editor-in-Chief [email protected]