Buzz roundtable: E-mail overload, 09/27/99

E-mail overload

Network World Fusion, 09/27/99

With the proliferation of corporate Web sites has come a proliferation of e-mail generated by those sites. Lots of users are struggling with how to respond to all this mail. Vendors such as Aditi, Brightware and eGain Communications claim to have the answer, with products that help users route and even automatically respond to e-mail. How important do you see these e-mail management products as being to enterprise users?

Nolle: That's a tough one. From my experience with those products, it's been very difficult to set them up so that they don't require almost as much manual attention as if you didn't have the product at all. You can look at them as a special case of an e-mail filter. And I'm sure every single one of Network World's readers who has employed an e-mail filter has spent a significant amount of time going to a directory where the supposed junk e-mail was put, and pulling out the legitimate messages that got trapped by it, and then getting rid of the junk ones that came in and looked legitimate. In the long run it's hard to say whether there was any benefit provided.

The challenge we have with e-mail is that there is a personal nature to human communications that we all seem to recognize. Most of us recognize junk e-mail by the lack of that personalization. So I'm afraid that if we get into a process where you're trying to manage e-mail generated by a site, generate automated responses and such, except for very certain and specific functions like order tracking, it may be counterproductive to try to go very deep into this because I'm afraid you're going to lose the sense of touch with the customer.

Kobielus: Content filtering technologies like this, as you've indicated, need a lot of human care and feeding because there are a lot of false positives. When you're talking about scanning the content of messages and then routing those message to the appropriate human beings, the list of what is considered an appropriate human being or department to handle any number of e-mails is always in flux and is always very ambiguous in any organization. No organization, no MIS department is going to have a firm grasp on who are the resource experts within the company who need to get this message or that message. I wouldn't trust MIS to tell the larger organization that certain messages are junk because they consider them junk. MIS knows computers and networks. We shouldn't generally give them the authority to decide what people need to know and don't know within an organization. So these content filtering technologies are just fraught with subjective issues.

Nolle: Yeah, I agree with that a lot.

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