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.