So, I just found out that a friend of mine has around 19000 emails in his inbox. According to him, it’s close to 90% unread.

Yeah, 19000, with 90% unread. (17100 if you are into this kind of stuff). Most of them are spam or automatic messages such as appointment reminders, servers notices, etc.
Obviously his problem is how to clean it all up. Obviously.

Now, an interesting question … people have outsourced various functions of their life … heck you actually use another person to raise your child for you. You trust someone else to do your taxes. Even let someone else work out the finer points of your retirement planning.

However, these same people have this natural fear of letting anyone else read their emails. Heck, I wouldn’t. Not even outsource it to Surabhi, my brother or a secretary. Whats a good solution?

Techies can put in some funky RegEx in their custom scripts to filter out most of the messages or use Outlook rules … but that doesn’t solve the whole problem. Scoble is constantly reminding us of how busy he is based on how many need-to-reply emails he has left. Heck, everyone has a similar problem. Personally, it doesn’t affect me (yet) … I read the ones that are important and file them, others I glance at and continue on to the next ones.

So … what would you do if you had thousands of unread emails, even after filtering out the junk?

Ignore them till someone actually knocks you on the head or calls you a few dozen times? (That leaves you with a dozen voicemails, which is an entirely more serious problem … you have to wade through them all one by one, using the cellphone … (if your cellular carrier (Vonage does!) forwards them as mp3s to … um, your email inbox, then you are back to square one))

Frack this information overload issue. Where the hell is my neural implant?

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