So I’m reading this book entitled Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe.

Its not a bad book, seems to be catered more towards people that are relatively new to the world of email. Not sure if I would buy it for any of my friends or clients but everything in this book is spot on. I feel a deja vu when I read this book, like I already know all this stuff, and assumed everybody else did also… I forget not that many people have been using email since 1993 :-)

I remember when we started putting together our Internet company in 1994 how nobody knew what we were talking about… its a wonder we ever convinced the bank to lend us some money to purchase the servers!

But I digress… the point I am trying to make here is that early in the book, the authors talk about how email can be counter productive for many people. If you get a few hundred emails a day (like me), or thousands even if you are the likes of Bill Gates, you probably need to figure out an efficient way to handle them. If you were like Bill Gates, you could hire email assistants that do nothing but read and respond to or delete your emails all day.

Another way, as the authors suggest, is to “think twice before giving out your address”. I couldn’t agree more. We don’t tell everybody exactly where we live and generally don’t give out our home number any more (we use our cell phones now for people to reach us) but when it comes to our email addresses, we give it out like a loose date looking to get some action.

Then we get email overload, coupled with the fact that more than 60% of emails today are SPAM, without SPAM filters we would be stuck under a mountain of email. Have you ever given out your email address to a friend only to find that s/he is sending out jokes to the rest of the world and putting everybody’s email address in the ‘TO:’ field? No wonder we have such a big problem with SPAM… our friends are the culprits!

Another solution, one that I utilize, is to give out a unique disposable email address to people and for web sites when you register on line, etc. For example, I subscribe to some news alerts from Google and each news alert has a unique disposable email address. This way, I know exactly who I have given that email address to, and if it ever gets compromised, I can simply delete or inactivate it and voila, probem solved! This system works so well for me that I have decided to make a service available for others.

We’re currently developing it so that it is user-friendly and we hope to have it launched in the next few weeks, maybe month. It will of course be free (ad sponsored) and my hope is that people will be able to reduce their inbox clutter and live their lives more fuller. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.