Thanksgiving For Email (Email Monday)

What's the first word that comes to your mind when you think of email? I hope you didn't say that too loud. Email is the bane of many people's existence. If it is for you, check out the many posts I have on coping with it. However, I am thankful for email.

Email is free. It's a beautiful thing to be able to send an email to a friend on the other side of the world for free! I love getting emails from vendors like Amazon.com and Newegg that let me know the status of my order at each stage of the game. This happens because email is free.

Email is fast. It's amazing that I can email a draft of a blog post to a friend in California, pick up the phone to talk to her about it, and it's already there. In addition, it's easy for me to draft an email while I'm standing in line at Wal-Mart on my Blackberry. That saves me time and helps me not get stressed out by the long wait.

Email is free from time. For us geeks, we call this asynchronous communications. Phone conversations are synchronous. In other words, we are talking at the same time. Thank God that's not the way email works. With email, when I have a thought about something, I can dash off and email and get it off my mind.

Sure, I know email can be a pain but without email mail we couldn't function in this fast-paced multi-faceted world of ours. Take a minute to be thankful for email.

• Get Your Gatekeepers Up
• How Well Do You Get Along With Your Email?

This post also appears on CE On Time .

Comments

[Lisa Hendey]

Thanks Craig, since we met via email I think this is a great post! Happy Thanksgiving!
Lisa

[Maggie]

I make my living managing email servers. It tends to be a thankless job, taken for granted that the emails will arrive at their destination. Between the people who complain we block too much spam and people who complain we do not block enough, It's nice to see someone considering the usefulness of the tool and being thankful for it.

I might disagree with the "Free" notion. Organizations provide it at a significant cost. The Free vendors (Hot Mail, Gmail, yahoo) support it with ads.