Is this just a long winded way of Jeff apologizing for being overloaded and giving himself a get out of jail free card?

He included the simple truth "humans don't scale". Surely that's the end of it.

Email or anything else isn't going to solve the problem that a single human only has a finite amount of attention to give things.

What scares me is that I have given up on the spam problem months ago and now just rely on the Thunderbird spam filter. So email is no longer a reliable way to contact me, because of the danger of false positives. Meanwhile, the junk mail folder contains thousands of emails, so there is no chance for sifting through it by hand.

While it's difficult to keep up with a steady stream of lengthy emails, I prefer that to phone calls. Especially when working with customers who tend to ask the same question multiple times. I'd rather send an email and attach the same file/text again and again than deal with the overhead of multiple phone calls.

I think email "works" for 99.99% of the people, who get reasonable number of emails from family, friends and collagues. I don't personally know anybody who is having these problems.

There are a few personalities like J. Atwood and M. Arrington, who are in the fortunate situation that everybody wants to talk to them, but email works for everybody else. Also, it seems to me that if everybody would call them, or text them, or IM them (as is suggested in the article) it'd be even worse.

If I'd be in their place I'd just set up an auto-reply that says "Sorry, I'm overloaded, I may be unable to reply to your message."

I do agree that it's an interesting question how their Inbox could auto-prioratize their messages so they can respond to the most urgent ones. But 99.99% of people have no need for this feature. (Being subscribed to tons of mailing lists doesn't count, those are easy to sort out.)

I agree. Gmail filters, username+keywork@gmail.com, or outlook filters make it possible to "auto-organize" incoming emails. I'd be curious to know the stats of filter use among Gmail regular users. I have dozens of labels and sublabels as well as dozens of filters in Gmail.

For the regular Joe, I don't think email overload is a real problem.

If someone sends you a long email trash it or call them once. I find I can process around 300 emails an hour if I just trash most of the unimportant ones. The secret is the one line response. Yes, No, Sorry I don't have the time etc. The older an email the more willing I am to just dump it into the trash.

Can somebody explain to me why email is so difficult to handle? I have four open accounts and get regular email for school and personal business, and I get the occasional set of messages about blogs, along with spam, and it still takes me at most fifteen minutes to sort out.

I wish email had a 140 character limit like twitter. Or that it allowed nothing but subject line.

That's the best idea I've read here in ages.

Now what's the next step?

I'm about 3000 messages behind on my email. This article struck a nerve...

CTRL+A, Del. You are never going to catch up in time anyway.

So IM is better? 3000 messages in my inbox that I can attend to when I'm ready vs. IM - where I'm dealing with everybody simultaneously and live? That's worse than the telephone, IMHO.

Anyway, if you get the same query more than once, it is time to put the answer into a wiki or blog.

I agree. I'm a big fan of asynchronous communication.

I only use IM for work and communicating with my wife during the work day. Fortunately, we use Skype at the office, so I can minimize my exposure to friends. I've discovered that even when I set my status in, say, Google Chat, to "Leave me alone" people still contact me, so I just got in the habit of not signing in.

I also don't have a high volume of email--even with list memberships, I probably don't receive more than 50 emails a day.

The difference is that people are more reluctant to IM you a question, and you can readily signal that you are unavailable.