The Uses of Email

At the office, we have moved from Outlook to GMail. Mostly the process went smoothly. I doubt that I will ever like the GMail interface as well as the Outlook web interface or fat client. (Yes, I know that one can use the Outlook client with GMail; but it isn't supported, and I have better things to do with my time than fight through that.) However, I grudgingly moved from GroupWise to Outlook some years ago, and got used to the latter, so I suppose I will forget Outlook almost as thoroughly as I have GroupWise.

There was some difficulty with moving certain shared mailboxes to Google groups, though. The network admin sent me a link to Google's page on automatic posting. The Python sample worked nicely once I had Python 2.7 installed on a virtual machine. Then it was a matter of reading the Outlook object documentation. Presently, I had a script to take messages from an Outlook inbox and post them to a Google group. It turned out that the messages in the box in question all had attachments, which meant a longer look at the Outlook and Python documentation. But presently that worked, too.

Then I had a close look at the Outlook inbox: about 1200 messages, all with attachments. I raised a question with the manager concerned: shouldn't this all be in a database? A simple table of administrator, employee, subject, date, and document could be easily searched, sorted and presented. We could in a matter of days put up a web interface to allow submission of the documents and allow her staff to see them. The answer was roughly: We are used to this, and people can check it on their phones. Well, they could on the interface I proposed, too. I pushed the messages.

For about twenty-five years I have seen people use email as a database, generally with some ill effects. In the old days, it slowed the shared minicomputer, for simply keeping track of thousands of files in one directory slowed such systems. Now it simply leads to important information being lost, or hard enough to find that it might as well be lost.

I do use email too much when I should write things down, or keep a computerized log of discussions held. It serves well enough as a journal, if one is reconciled to a journal that lasts only so many months. Now and then this does catch up with me.