November 2010, before I "settled down" with a "real job."

The last blog post I wrote was about how little time I have to do email and the difficulty in coping with it. Often when I meet new people, they quickly take a look at my blog and read the top post, which in this case is a whiny post about how busy I am - fine, but not exactly the most exciting place to start a conversation. The fact that I haven't written anything really interesting on this blog since then is a testament to the fact that I haven't solved my "busy problem", but I thought I'd give you an update on the somewhat improved state of things.

After the last post, Ray Ozzie pointed out in the comments that I was looking at the problem the wrong way. Instead of trying to allot partial attention to doing email during meetings, he suggested I should instead figure out how to effectively process email where the input and output flows are balanced. I took his feedback to heart and have embarked on trying to make my inbox processing more efficient. In case it is useful for people, here are a few protocols that I've instituted.

While I don't get to inbox zero every day, I get to near inbox zero at least once a week. I feel that I'm mostly on top of things, and if I'm unable to do something or meet someone, it is because I really am unable to do it, rather than just accidentally missing it. This feels much better.

My next step will start after the new year, when I'll start scheduling exercise, learning and "mindfulness pauses" into each day and pushing my bar for saying "yes" to requests much higher to try to make room for this.

So far, I've implemented the following steps, which you, too, might find effective:

NRR

My signature file says, "Tip: Use NRR to mean No Reply Required - thank you!", and I've tried to make it a "thing" for my associates to let each other know when you are sending a message that doesn't need a reply. This cuts down on the "thanks!" or "OK!" type emails.

Sanebox

I use Sanebox which is a service that sorts your email behind the scenes into various folders. Only people who you have written email to in the past or people or domain names that have been "trained" end up in your inbox. You train Sanebox by dragging email into different folders to teach it where they should go or you can program domains, or certain strings in the subject line to send the message to a particular box. I have four folders. "Inbox" which is where the important messages go, "@SaneLater" where email from people I don't know go, "@SaneBulk" where bulk email goes and "@SaneBlackHole" where things go that you never want to see again.

Help

Gmail has a nifty feature that allows you to give access to your inbox to other people. Two people have access to my inbox to help me triage and write replies. They also keep an eye on "@SaneLater" for messages from new people who I should pay attention to. Requests requiring actions or replies that are substantial go to Trello. (More below about Trello.) Information requests, requests that need to be redirected to someone else, or meetings that I can't possibly attend get processed right in my inbox. Email that needs a reply but won't take more than a few minutes ends up getting converted into a ticket in Keeping and assigned to whoever should be involved. (More on Keeping below.)

Slack

We have a Media Lab Slack channel and any interaction that can be settled on Slack, we do on Slack and try not to create email threads.

Trello

Trello is a wonderful tool that allows you to track tasks in groups. It's organized very much like a "Kanban" system and is used by agile software developers and others who need a system of tracking tasks through various steps. Trello lets you forward email to create cards, assign cards to people to work on, and have conversations on each card via email, a mobile app and a desktop app.

I have two "boards" on Trello. One is a "Meetings" board, where each meeting request starts life in the "Incoming" list with a color coded tag for which city the request is for or whether it is a teleconference. I then drag meetings requests from "Incoming" to "Someday Soon" or "Schedule" or "Turn Down."

The cards in "Schedule" are sorted roughly in order of priority, and my team takes cards from the top of the list and starts working on scheduling them in that order. Meetings where we have suggested dates and are awaiting confirmation go to the "Waiting For Confirmation" list, and cards that are confirmed end up in "Confirmed" list. If for some reason a meeting fails to happen, then its card gets moved to "Failed/Reschedule", and when meetings are completed, they end up in "Completed." At least once a week, I go through and archive the cards in the "Completed" list after scanning for any missing follow-up items or things that I need to remember. I also go through "Incoming" and "Someday Soon" lists and make more decisions on whether to schedule or turn down meeting requests. And I try to check the priority ranking of the "Schedule" list.

In addition to the "Meetings" board, I have a "To Do" board.

The To Do boards has a similar "Incoming" list of things that others or I think might be something worth doing. When I've committed to doing something, I move it to the "Committed" list. When something isn't done and instead gets stuck because I need a response from someone, it moves to a "Waiting" list. Once completed, it goes to "Completed" and is later archived after I've given myself sufficient positive feedback for having completed it. I also have "Abandoned" and "Turn Down" and "Delegated" lists on this board.

Keeping

Keeping is a tracker system very similar to what a customer support desk might use. It allows you to convert any email into a "ticket" and you can create an email address that is also the email address for the ticket system. More people have access to my ticket system than my inbox. Once an email becomes a ticket, everyone on the team can see the ticket as a thread, and we can put private notes on the thread for context. Keeping manages the email exchange with the "customer" so that anyone can take care of responding to the inquiry, but the people who are assigned to the email have it show up as "open" in their personal list. When a thread is taken care of, the ticket is "closed" and the thread is archived. Threads that are still not finished stay "open" until someone closes it. If someone replies to a "closed" thread, it is reopened.

Keeping is a Chrome and Gmail plug in and is a bit limited. We recently started using it, and I think I like it, though some of us use a desktop mail client which limits features you can access such as assignment or closing tickets. Keeping also has a bit of a delay to process requests which is annoying when we're triaging quickly. Keeping also can be redundant with Trello, so I'm not positive it's worth it. But for now, we're using it and giving it a chance to settle into our process.

You can book me

I've found that 15-minute office hours are an effective (but tiring) way of having short, intense but often important meetings. I use a service called youcanbook.me. It lets me take a block of time in my calendar and allow people to sign up for 15-minute slots of it via the website, using a form that I design. It automatically puts the meeting in my Google calendar and sends me an email and tracks cancellations and other updates.

Editors

I have a number of people who are good at editing documents ranging from email to essays and letters. I use Google docs and have people who are much better than me copy edit my writing when it is important.

I think it's because a lot of spam comes from Asian domains and IP addresses, but more and more ISPs and companies are banning email from addresses in Asia. I now get at least a few of these a day:

: host smtp1.***.com[xx.xx.xx.xx] said: 550
Rejected: No spam wanted here. Your email was deemed to be spam and is not
accepted. Send a message to postmaster@***.com if you feel this
rejection is in error. (in reply to end of DATA command)
Reporting-MTA: dns; 35.145.221.202.bf.2iij.net
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: 8880B67052
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; jito.***.com
Arrival-Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2007 17:53:05 +0900 (JST)

I don't know exactly what you guys can do about it, but blocking regions seems a bit blunt and rude. The IP address I'm sending from is a pretty legitimate block of address owned by WIDE.

The reason I suspect that it is an Asian thing is that the usual response from the various "postmasters" is, "oh, it's because the email is from an Asian address."

Is there any way to get my IP address added to some white-list so this doesn't happen or will the physical proximity of my mail server always cause my IP address to be painted with the spam brush?

Although I suppose that's how it feels when blog comments get stuck in my spam queue. The only difference is that I look at those regularly and let them through. These spam rejection notices are basically 86 at the door deals.

I can't get to my personal email server from Shanghai so if you have sent email to one of my other accounts and need to reach me urgently, please send it to joiito at gmail or joi at technorati.com which are both working.

Please please stop setting up scripts that bounce virus and spam email back to the sender. You're doubling the spam. Usually the sender or the "from:" is forged. My mailbox is getting filed with people bouncing email back to me that did not originate from me. (I DO check the IP addresses in the headers to makes sure.) What triggered this message was from an ignorant ass who bounced a message to me saying:

Your mail was rejected

You are crimer

Checking the header showed that it came from an IP address of a network I've never been on.

So please. Stop it.

Ariel has started a service called Mailinfo. It looks pretty interesting. It's a plugin for Outlook that lets you see when people have read email that you've sent. Too bad it doesn't work on OSX yet. With all of the spam filters and "gee I wonder if he read my email..." stuff going on, this might be a good tool to unbreak email. Ariel! Hurry up and write a plugin for Mac users. ;-)

It looks like my backlog of email has reached a critical level. I will try to get to it in the next few days, but apologies to people waiting for replies from me.

People have been auctioning Google gmail invitations on eBay. Jonas has set up a gmail invitation exchange for people who donate invitations and for people willing to do something "good" in exchange for an invite.

Jonas

It's not free, however. If you're interested in one, comment here and let me know what you're willing to do for it. Not to me (though I am more than ready to trade for a few good massages), but to someone else. A random act of kindness, maybe? Work in a soup kitchen? Help out at a needle exchange? Or maybe you're doing that already - you'd be the ideal recipient.

I've been having email problems and have been missing email the last few weeks. I'm pretty sure I'm caught up on my email so if I haven't responded to an email you've sent, can you try sending it again? Sorry about this!

Scambaiting is the sport of baiting and messing with 419 scammers.

via Thomas

LOAF

Loaf is a way to share your address book without abandoning your privacy.

Yet another cool idea hatched on IRC by Joshua and Maciej with help from Peter and Dan. It's a distributed email hack that uses Bloom Filters to allow you to check whether mail is from people you know, partial strangers or complete strangers. Lots of obvious applications in spam filters and social networks. Good stuff.

Check out the web page.

Mailblocks was working well for me ever since it it failed on my in January. At the time, I told them that they should have an outages page so that users could find out why mail wasn't working and when it might be back up.

This time, I can access the mailbox, but I haven't been able to receive any new mail for about 8.5 hrs. So if you're trying to reach me urgently, please email me or leave a comment here.

They don't have any information on their page or replied to the email I've sent. hmm...

I am joi_ito at mac.com on AIM.

UPDATE: FYI. Mailblocks was acquired by AOL.

I'm at a dinner where we're talking about spam. There are high level execs from many of the companies involved in email. One person said that he thought we've seen the worst of spam and that it's getting better. It's too bad I can't quote people with attribution, because I think this is a totally unreasonable position.

We've now moved on to Internet governance and as usual, I haven't heard a single opinion that convinces me that email isn't broken and that it isn't just getting worse. We talked about pay to send, better filters, re-inventing smtp, regulations... all of the usual. Yet another fruitless discussion about spam. (yafudas). 17% of legitimate email is not delivered. 81% of people in a recent survey are afraid of false positives.

I don't know if it is just me or the entire service, but Mailblocks.com, my mail host/spam filter was down for about 11 hours yesterday and has been down most of today. (Still down.) It appears that it is bouncing my mail with a error 500. If you have sent me any important mail in the last day or two, please send it to jito(at)eccosys.com or IM me at joi_ito(at)mac.com.

This is the first time I haven't had access to my mail server directly and BOY IS IT FRUSTRATING. I'm going to take a look at moving my mail back under my own control. This really sucks. Does anyone know someone at Mailblocks.com? All I have is a silly support email for them. I wish they had IM support like Earthlink. Ugh.

UPDATE: I'm starting to get really upset now... Why don't they even have an outage statement on their web page or their support page. Hello!?!

UPDATE 2: First of all. Thanks to everyone for their constructive comments. I DO have backup routes to divert my email, but the problem is that the server kept going up and coming down so I never knew when to "throw the switch". I don't like to keep backups spooling my mail because I travel a lot and I can't afford to download redundant mail or allow mailboxes to overflow. (I guess I could auto-delete old backup mail... hmm...)

Also, in the comments people pointed out that their CEO, Phil Goldman, recently passed away and might have something to do with this. I feel very bad about this and didn't realize it at the time. For this reason I have decided to cut them some slack.

Anyway, although my email to support@mailblocks didn't get a response and a call at night didn't reach anyone, I just called and stayed on the line past all of the messages about entering the extension number of the person you want to reach (of course I know no one there) and that I should email support messages (I did several times), I reached a human being. She was nice and when I told her that I was having problems she said that she had heard people were having problems and agreed to pass me over to tech support. The tech support guy was a pleasant guy and he told me that app1, my server, was having hardware problems and that although they didn't know when it would be fixed, that they were working on it. I suggested to him that they have an "outages" page with ETA's of when things might be fixed so they could calm people like me down and help us figure out whether we should be waiting or diverting our email. He said he had received this suggestion from several people they were considering it.

So, my position right now is that I still like the service very much and will continue using it. I will put better backups in place. They seem to be nice people, but they need to provide better support and I hope they figure this out.

FINAL (I HOPE) UPDATE: Seems to be working now. Switching back...

Merry Christmas everyone. Many years ago, I stopped sending Christmas cards. Last year, I stopped sending out traditional Japanese New Years cards and sent email instead. This year, I'm going to stop sending email greetings as well. I hate to be a scrooge, but firing up my bulk mailer, importing my address book and spewing forth my seasons greetings feels way too much like spam.

Thanks to my birthday script, I have a way to spread greetings to my friends across the whole year instead of having to pack it all into one day. (By the way, if I don't know you, you're not going to get a personal greeting...) So please excuse me if you don't get a electronic greeting card from me for the holidays. As Seth says, I think this is one more treasured tradition that has become roadkill along the information super-highway.

On that note, does anyone know who decided that in Japan, Christmas was the day that you were supposed to go on a date with your honey and end up in a hotel room? Every restaurant has a special Christmas menu tonight for couples and ALL of the hotel will be booked by couples for a romantic evening.

Did you know that Japanese families will be lining up in front of Kentucky Fried Chickens today to get their chicken for Christmas? I DO know where this comes from. When my friend Shin, introduced KFC to Japan, the ad campaign showed wealthy American families all eating friend chicken for their holiday feast. KFC was marketed as an upscale food of the privileged in America. This triggered a tradition in Japan for families to eat friend chicken on Christmas.

(I'm on a roll now...)

And you DO know that in Japan only men receive chocolates on Valentine's Day and that women receive their chocolates on "White Day" one month later. (This notion was introduced by the confectionary industry in Japan.) People are encouraged to give chocolates widely and these chocolates are called giri choko (obligatory indebtedness chocolates) in Japanese.

So, although I'm a sucker for ritual, this is all getting a bit crazy for me. I think I'm going p-time on this whole situation and will give people gifts and greet people spontaneously and in a load-balanced way so I don't get thrown out with the spam.

UPDATE: No room at Japan's Love Hotels at Christmas - BBC
Thanks for the link Khalid

Larry is using a white-list spam filter called Mail Blocks. I used to run a server side white-list spam blocker but people got upset so I stopped. Now people are upset because of false positives and just getting buried in my email. I think I'll try this for awhile. Bear with me. You will probably get a challenge/response the first time you send me email again.

I think it may be due to the press I got this month, but my mailbox has been totally overloaded with a variety requests. I've tried to go back and follow up with people who have sent me email, but I think I've missed a bunch. If you've sent me email about something and haven't received a reply, can you either put yourself in my Public To Do List or continue to ping me? I know this is rude, but not replying is more rude. I try to reply to everything I get, so if you've been ignored, it is accidental. Sorry.

Good rant from Ray Ozzie on the death of email.

Ray Ozzie

As time goes on, though, you'll only visit eMail as a low-priority background task, much as you do when sorting through your physical mail at home. You'd never do important work through your home mailbox, would you?

Exactly.

Email is breaking, breaking, broken. Adriaan has a neat graph.

Ray links to Clay and Ross who link to Gelernter and Hornik on the issue.

I recently received email from Bruce Schneier. It was my first interaction with Bruce. He introducing himself, said that he occasionally reads my blog and requested a response to a request from me. I responded and received no reply. I've sent him several emails since then, but haven't gotten any response.

I don't know Bruce well, but from the tone of the email, he seemed anxious to get a response to me about his request. With all of the spam SNAFU these days, I have no idea if my email is getting through. I am left with a weird feeling not being sure whether he's busy or my email has disappeared. Email is truly broken.

So Bruce. if you're reading this please let me know if you got my email or not. If someone who knows Bruce well is reading this, can you ask him?

Two of my emails to ado got blocked by SpamAssassin today. According to him SpamAssassin message, my server was an open relay. I asked about this on #joiito and crysflame pointed to an article that explains that Osirusoft which Spam Assassin uses to check for open relays is broken. "Apparently, after having been DDOS'ed, the Osirusoft people have 'given up the ghost' and are now returning back every IP as a spam source when queried!"

So if you want to get mail from me, please reconfigure SpamAssassin as explained on the use PERL; site.

UPDATE: µthe inquirer has an article about this.