I’m becoming decreasingly happy with using email for some purposes. This is an attempt to put into words one small subset of the problems I feel exist with email (as a general concept). I’m not going to propose any solutions …
This set of complaints is with mailing lists. There are a number of inter-related problems.
It is very hard to find which mailing list will suit a particular purpose. It is hard to find names for mailing lists that clearly express the set of people that will be recipients. It is very hard to tell who will be recipients when you send an email to a particular list.
Underlying this is an impossible problem; almost every single email to a mailing list has a slightly different definition of who the desired recipient set should be.
Take the example of a research group; do you want to send to everyone who is a formal member of the group? everyone who uses that group’s facilities? everyone who works in that group’s area of the building? does the group include undergraduates doing a 4th year research project?
Do the “staff” of that research group include just the academic staff? the academic staff and administrators? do research fellows count? teaching assistants? research assistants? technicians?
There is no single correct answer; each sender of an email “to the group” has a different need and a different expectation (and almost always, their expectation mismatches the reality).
The over-systematising solution is to produce a thousand mailing lists, each with a very specific defined set of recipients.
This does not make the world a better place! (it doesn’t even help).
There is a subsidiary problem with the maintenance of membership of mailing lists, although that’s more of an implementational problem than an intrinsic one.
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