The Filter Ate My Email

I don’t know if you received my last email. Unfortunately, you have the same uncertainty with emails that you send to your project team, and the problem is getting worse. You almost have to talk to someone to be sure they received an email message.

Spam clutters our inboxes making it hard to find what we want and more likely to accidentally discard an important email.

Spam filters limit what you can say in an email. Outlook’s spam filter removes many messages that discuss financial matters, and other spam filters are even more aggressive. (I can’t give examples or this email would be filtered) Last summer the press reported that Yahoo email substitutes synonyms for certain words in the body of emails to reduce the chance of trojan and virus attacks. As spam increases, spam filters are likely to make business email increasingly unreliable.

Confirmed Project Communications

Since clear and dependable communications are keys to successful projects, a solution to reliable electronic communications is needed. Here are some ideas.

Consider placing the critical project information in a shared workspace and then establish a project norm that everyone must look at it every day. There are many solutions that provide this capability such as eRoom, Notes, WebEx, MS SharePoint, Yahoo Groups, Groove and over a hundred other applications. A new and lower cost option is to use a Weblog inside your firewall as a daily project newsletter… easy to update, find, and read.

Weblog publishing for team news

Other Routes to the Inbox

Closed systems can provide true guaranteed delivery. Groove Networks' message status is displayed until the recipient opens the message. This is the assured delivery we need. Unfortunately, it only works for Groove messages, not with all email.

When I am working on a project, I set my local filters to not spam-search the email addresses of each person on the team. It would be nice if Outlook would not spam-check email addresses found in its address book. (an idea for Microsoft).

Return receipts don’t work. Few people allow receipts to be returned and tracking return receipts against distribution lists is an administrative mess.

And the Answer Is?

We need to solve the spam problem and a great solution has not yet emerged. In the mean time, email must be considered unreliable for critical project communications.

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