E-mail
isn’t free. It seems free. It feels free. We’ve been living with it for perhaps twenty years or so
and it is now totally ingrained in our lives. It’s fast, it’s ubiquitous and damn
it, it’s free. But only two of those three are true: it’s not free. Every
e-mail sent has enormous consequences for the recipients. In an old world of
work messages had overheads: typists, time invested to ensure correct layout and
spelling, time to consider sheer courtesy. It meant that messages were considered
and not wasted; they were not free and often not easy. Now they are easy and standards can become very low. Consequently for so
many people time is wasted every single day coping with mails which are tricky to understand, are fragmented, to which you needn't have been copied, which are too demanding too soon... Imagine every e-mail needed a
postage stamp and you had a small daily budget and thus you had to make every
mail count and you could save money by sending fewer. Send fewer. To fewer. CC fewer. Build a better business.