Rant: Institutional Email...
Sunday, July 17, 2011 at 9:11PM As I prepare to leave my current postdoctoral position and embark on a new chapter of my career, I'm again faced with going through the process of changing my 'institutional email address'. This is to say that the email address given to me by my current employer will be shut down and I'll have to obtain yet another one at my new place of work. I've gone through the following institutional suffixes in the last decade: '@dal.ca', '@sfu.ca', '@mcmaster.ca', and finally '@mail.nih.gov'. At this point, I consider myself somewhat of a 'professional' and find it very annoying that, yet again, I'll have to send out a blanket email telling a variety of people to 'please update their address books'. No doubt, I've lost contact with prior acquaintances solely because my email addresses have constantly been changing.
It would be far more useful both career and personal-wise if I had a functionally-permanent, independent email address, wouldn't it? The obvious solution would therefore be to either a) use my gmail address, or b) pay for a professional 3rd party email box. However, there's a big catch: many professional activities require 'institutional email addresses'. For instance, I've had calls for manuscript review that required an institutional address, people wanting letters of reference from me requiring an institutional address, and various campus organizations that refused to send information to any other email address. Great.
It would be wrong to say that the impermanence of institutional addresses for non-faculty is their only weakness. In fact, I'm often surprised by how unfriendly most of these email servers have been as compared to the free, ad-supported gmail1. For instance, all of my institutional email servers have had tiny maximum attachment sizes and ludicrously small maximum storage capacities - without exaggeration, I've hit max capacity (from a fresh clean) on my current professional email address in an afternoon of being sent powerpoint slides. Gmail's capacity is > 36 times the capacity of my institutional mailbox. Yet another problem is that these mailboxes are difficult to access. Obviously, this is partly due to security reasons, but I'm also talking about terrible, slow web interfaces as well. Don't even get me started about what a chore it is to search through my mail, or how tedious it is to set up any kind of address book.
Unfortunately, all of this belies the greatest travesty underlying institutional email addresses: The insane amount of 'legitimate junk mail' one receives on a daily basis. Consider the following: I have no problem giving out my gmail account to every ridiculous online marketing scheme in existence. The very first email they send me goes into a filter (they take roughly 10 seconds to set up) and I never hear from said company again. I get surprisingly little junk mail to my free, ad-supported email account.
On the flipside, I receive multiple dozens of emails per day to my institutional account from various sources because I am automatically associated with a bunch of 'distribution lists'. It actually drives me crazy to think that part of the cost of running various institutions goes to paying the salaries of people who send out inane email 'reminders' about upcoming flu season/performance by X at local venue/inspirational message from program chair/etc. At my current institution, I get tons of emails that have absolutely nothing to do with me but are sent to everyone by default.
The tragedy of this is that I and others regularly miss emails about legitimate issues such as documents that need to be filled out and signed or training that needs to be complete because we don't want to waste time reading every random message that hits our inbox. All of this junk is a waste of time and money for the person writing it, and a larger waste of time and money for all of the people who then have to read it. Think about this: If I'm right, it would actually be better to pay a person to write the inane email and send it to their own trash folder than to mail it to everyone in terms of net productivity.
There's a substantial literature on the 'information overload' effect of email (for example, see here). It's ease-of-use as compared to traditional 'snail mail' has led to its overuse, forcing us all to waste time on reading meaningless trivialities that accomplish little if anything2. Even ignoring all of the earlier complaints, if using my gmail account allowed me to get off of all of these distribution lists so that I receive only messages directed to me, that alone would be a massively welcome change. Oh well.
1I have no idea how some people can still use Hotmail, however. Unless they've changed radically in the past few years, I've always found their servers to be incredibly slow and tedious.
2I'm open to be proven wrong on this one, but my hypothesis is that sending me some ridiculous clip art about allergy season does nothing to reduce the very real irritation that my allergies cause.
Rant, Technology
Reader Comments (5)
Interesting rant, Carlo. I think however that we must keep in mind that institutional emails go out to tons of people with highly different backgrounds (especially at NIH). They are read by people that dropped out from HS as well as by guys with 5 PhD's, 2 MDs and 3 random master degrees. They are also read by people that barely understand plain English, so they better be as obvious as possible (hence the ridiculous .gifs?). Also, gmail makes a living of having a good email system, but it's not the case of NIH (or any other institution for that matter). Add to that a below-average IT team and you get the kind of situation we are in.
I think the most annoying is to have to let everybody know of your email address change, that's really a pain in the butt. That's why I go with my gmail address as much as possible when it comes to friends, family, etc ... I also store all my contacts in gmail and not in the NIH system.
This rant wasn't specifically directed at the NIH, but I understand where you're coming from. However, I wouldn't change my opinion:
1) The ridiculous gifs are rarely (if ever) relevant to helping communicate the content of the email. I'm also kind of bullish on the English thing: Being able to speak English is part of the requirement of having a job here.
2) The IT system at the NIH is quite sophisticated, so much so that there's an internal directory with everyone's role and position that's easily accessible and searchable. They know that there's no need to send me constant information useful only to full-time staff.
I accept that some degree of this sort of stuff is inevitable, but the situation at many institutions and real-world jobs has gotten totally out of hand. Every bulk email should be carefully considered by the sender: Is this necessary? Do I really need an 'inspirational' message reminding me of this or that historical fact? Is it relevant to the work-goals of the staff? etc.
I never bothered with my ubc email during my phd - kept using my sfu alumni account. when it went to email forwarding, I made a new hotmail account (i.e. clean) and use that. It is easy enough and suits my purpose. I have a gmail account but I don't really like it.
Perhaps I never reached the professional heights required, but I rarely needed my institutional email anyway - and when I did, I had it forwarded to my hotmail account. That being said, it is irritating hearing about every little thing in your department/building... though sometimes something would be interesting (i.e. an interesting talk).
Just try email forwarding to gmail and have it remove the distribution lists emails, then if you need to go back, you can check your institutional account 1x a week for a seminar email you may need, etc...
Darrell
My office mate added the email addresses of the department secretaries to his spam filter. If he wants to find out about an upcoming presentation, thesis defence, or other special event he walks down the hall and reads the paper notices pinned to the wall next to the department office.
I'm thinking I should do the same. He says he's quite happy with this system, and mocks me when I rant about the inane foolishness that drops into my inbox.
Yours is a good rant. Nicely done.
Thanks Martin! I realize that all of this is a careful balance between the desire to communicate legitimately important info and the ease of email. I really think that it just requires some evaluation of what is worth communicating. We get tons of random stuff in our inbox here :-(