A recent series of postings from Peter St Andre on the theme of Email Blows. Looks like Peter is going to try to give it up. I will keep a close eye on his trials and travails, and hope he filnds some combination of tools and tricks that will show me how to do it.

Peter St Andre

[from Email Delenda Est!]

Wherein I begin to wean myself off email.

Cato the Elder ended all of his speeches in the Roman Senate with the phrase "Carthago delenda est" -- Carthage must be destroyed. I feel about email as Cato felt about Carthage, but with much better reason. Carthage was home to a thriving and largely peaceful commercial culture; email is home to junk, porn, viruses, and spam. Truly, email is a slum [Doc Searles] and I've decided to do something about it by striving to live email-free. If people contact me via email about Jabber-related matters, I tell them to use Jabber. I have converted my subscriptions to every possible email list from email to "nomail" by reading the messages in Pan via the wonderful Gmane service ("mail to news and back again"). I have asked the good people at Gmane to add a number of other open lists that I follow. I'm using Jabber chatrooms for communication (all logged for future reference). I'm investigating ways to build news-like messaging services on top of the XMPP publish-subscribe extension. I'm cheering on those who are developing reliable SMTP gateways ("from mail to Jabber and back again", anyone?). I'm blogging more about Jabber and will try hard to publish the Jabber Journal more often. I'm doing everything I can to eliminate the scourge of email, at least in my own life.

Email delenda est!