Creative Good: Bad Bad Bad!

Just read Creative Good’s paper on Managing Incoming E-mail. There is so much wrong with it that I don’t know where to start.

Am I alone in feeling that this didactic crap based around the notion that you should delete everything in your inbox is deeply, deeply bad advice, and patronising with it? I rely on my inbox (and the sub-folders in it) as raw material for future work; an archive to be consulted; ammunition to protect me, etc. Pull it out of the inbox and file it elsewhere perhaps (although sacrificing the ability to subsequently search the contents is a bit worrying), but deleting it? WTF?

The information it gives on how to set up Outlook filters to delete spam is next to useless. Anyone who gets even a small amount of spam these days knows that the spammers defeated Outlook’s puny defences years ago. As to the “advice” on how to read email, and the whole chapter on “How to delete spam” – flabbergasting, patronising, crass, aaargh!

The only good thing about the paper is in the discussion of the state of email clients at the end, and the screenshot of that utterly opaque Outlook dialogue asking whether you want to turn the journal on. I’m glad somebody thinks that’s as nuts as I do.