Declaring Bankruptcy

  Bankruptcy Made E-Z!! 
  Originally uploaded by travistubbs.net.

I am so far behind on email that I am declaring bankruptcy.

If you've sent me an email (and you aren't my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again.

I am starting over.

Comments

[franz enzenhofer]

well, if you start over then make a clean break an start using a new email client. i recommend gmail. and if the break should be really clean, start using a new OS (ubuntu). and then there is the possibility to start a new blog, but that would be our loss.

[Dan Blank]

What a great way to start the morning after such a beautiful weekend. Well done!

[mike oliver]

I'm curious - Does that mean that you are actually going to delete everything and start over? Or, does it simply mean that you aren't going to attempt to read anything sent prior to today?

[akahn]

It'd be nice to have a util that won't let you send a new e-mail (or read one, for that matter), unless you take an action with an existing, read e-mail.

[Terry Jones]

Fred - I love it!

This calls for chapter11email.com

When you go into email bankruptcy, you set your email up to all go to fred@chapter11email.com. You tell them a few crucial email addresses that simply have to get through (spouse, siblings, etc). Mail from these people will be forwarded to a new, private, email address. You are then, literally, in receivership.

chapter11email takes care of replying thoughtfully to your subsequent incoming email. They do helpful things when/if you emerge from email bankruptcy (perhaps with a new email address).

When you enter email bankruptcy, you also send your inbox to chapter11email. Those are your accumulated debts. chapter11email goes through your email backlog, collecting stats about who (of your non-crucial contacts) has been emailing you, how frequently, with what urgency (wheel in patented Artificial Intelligence keyword-based urgency detection algorithm), etc. They mail your creditors on your behalf (with a Reply-to address at chapter11email.com), telling them that you've declared email bankruptcy, apologizing, giving an indication of how many other creditors there are, expected time to emerge from bankruptcy, etc.

Maybe you tell chapter11email that you're only going to be able to pay off 10 cents on the email dollar. It then sends mail to your creditors. Each gets a copy of all the mails they have sent you, and they are told to pick the 10% they most want a reply to.

I think the bankruptcy analogy has legs. The problem is only going to get worse, so it's clearly a market with hundreds of billions of potential customers, at least. Probably more. We only need 1% of them. We just need an entrepreneurial teenager with a couple of days of Ruby on Rails experience to write the code. And a little funding from USV.

Terry

[Ming Jack Po]

Argh, I've thought about doing this many times, but managed to hold down the fort for now.

I now make it a point to reduce my un-answered emails to below 40 before I sleep... or else I don't sleep.

[nix]

Why is the world so entangled with email? I have been at numerous companies and the priority is for everyone is to get an email response in seconds after they sent it... Hence then they email your boss saying your aren't responding....

Seriously the world has wigged out over sending and receiving emails. Best job I have every had is where I had a response window of 4 hours. It let me get my job done and respond to emails.

Kudos for deleting all the cruft from your inbox. Stop the insanity people...

PS: sorry about the Suan Powter quote.

[syntaxman]

If you're really gonna blow away all your e-mail, you may want to consider whitelists. It's a rather extreme way of filtering e-mail so that you only receive messages from people you allow ahead of time. Several e-mail clients can do this, but I do all my filtering on my e-mail server. Filtering on the server is nice because it doesn't matter what mail client you use, your filters are always in place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitelist#E-mail_whitelists

syntaxman

[Pete]

I love Terry's idea. In a world without spammers, it could work really well. Unfortunately, anything that automatically sends mail in response to incoming mail is just going to end up confirming itself as alive and triggering a further rush.

[Jeff Haynie]

Wow, I know this feeling.... Maybe we all need a "email free day".