Yesterday fellow blogger Tina Su published 15 tips to writing an effective email. Tina is a very talented writer and I suggest you follow her blog, but that’s beside the point. The title alone got me thinking about email and how I use it to interact with other people. The realization is that I rarely use email outside of work anymore, rather it’s a last resort to contact someone and I have maybe a dozen of my closest friends email addresses, the rest I don’t. So what happened?

Email was partially created to fill a void in the time it took to deliver a message from one physical location to another location faster. It did that, and as someone who’s been using email since about 1994, I don’t know that I would ever go back to putting a piece of paper in an envelope, sticking a stamp on it and waiting. Now, the post office has a time and place for things, but for sharing information, it’s not that great, and it’s expensive if you want to share with a lot of people.

Over the last eight years or so, I’ve relied less and less on email for contact though; forums were a huge boom around the turn of the century and created something called a Private Message. An email of sorts but only on the forum that you belonged too between other people who belonged to the forum. I’ve actually been running my own photography forum since 2003 and am still active on a number of other forums covering various topics, 99.5% of the people on these forums I do not have an email address for and that’s OK because I know that they can be contacted through the forum.

The next major move was in 2002 when Friendster was started, the first really successful social networking site. Today MySpace and Facebook are the leaders, but they allow you to connect in an informal way with everyone from family to celebrities. What they also offer is the ability to see if the person you sent the message to read it or not, something that email could never effectively do.

Photo by: cambodia4kidsorg

Twitter has also made it possible to keep in contact with people quickly, and more and more people use it as a chat program, even though chat has been around for years.  It’s been called real time blogging, but in the nearly year I’ve been using it, I see more conversations going on between people than I do blogging.

Most websites have also stripped off email contacts replacing them with forms, much like you see here on Randomn3ss’s Contact page because it cuts down on spam, and embraced so called Web 2.0 ideas like social networking & bookmarking sites and Twitter. While I do reply to your messages via email, it’s not the technology you used to get in contact with me first.

Tina’s article contains concepts and ideas that can be used on forums, social networking sites, Twitter and even text messages, but on a whole, I think email is slowly slipping away much in the same manner the hand written letter has. Email isn’t going to die, but it’s been painfully living on, crippled by spam, your friend Angela who forwards everything she thinks is funny to you and endless marketing emails from companies you bought products from that are pleading with you to buy more.

For more then seven years now I have been using email hosted through one of my domain names, if not several. I made the move for several reasons, one of which was when I started photography on a more serious level; having a Hotmail account didn’t seem so professional. I enjoyed a spam free life for several years as a result and have loved the ability to use Outlook and custom scripts.

About two years ago is when the spam started to get really out of hand for me, today I receive upwards of 1500 messages daily and my web hosts says they are doing everything they can. While I doubt they are really doing everything, I’ve had the need to be more mobile with my email. Dealing with that much spam through a web based interface sucks, so I got a Gmail invite shortly after it was announced. Back then, one could actually sell invites to Gmail, strange, I know.

In any event, I mostly wanted it so I could get the email address of my choice and not stick a bunch of numbers or underscores or dumb stuff under it. For more then a year, it sat idle; I had no use for it. I dealt with the spam, tried to run custom scripts, and just got overwhelmed. After not checking my email for about 4 months I logged in to see close to 70,000 emails download from my server. That’s it, I was done, and it was my breaking point.

During this time I also needed a way to get a hold of people outside of social networking sites and text messages, in addition to paying bills online and getting a few email newsletters I truly enjoy. This is where Gmail came to save the day.

While I tend not to jump on the bandwagon when new products and services come out, this is one I should have jumped on earlier. I love the ability to be back to a web based email, checking at work, forwarding to phone, etc. I could run it through Thunderbird, my favorite mail application now, however I don’t. In a previous article, I’ve mentioned my love for a Firefox add-on that allows me to upload files to my Gmail account, comes in very handy as a personal server.

My concern now is that Gmail is still beta. Google has a long running habit of keeping products in beta forever. Blogger took several years before it was a final release and Google very rarely dumps products that have passed alpha and made it to beta, but they could.

Millions of us are now addicted to Gmail, what if it ups and closes tomorrow? What if it goes to a fee based service? I wouldn’t pay for it, I already pay for my own domains and web hosting, but I like Gmail, so maybe I would. Not having control over the final outcome makes me a bit weary.

Browsing through a website the other day I found something rather interesting in the footer

Spam is the one thing on the internet I hate most, and there is no good way to get rid of it unless you change your email address. I really wonder how enforceable this is though, especially since most spam is not sent from the US.

Found on: Dave Phillips Music & Sound

If you are not already using Firefox, get it, simple as that. The Gmail Space extension will load into your status bar and allow you to easily upload files to your Gmail account. With nearly 3GB of storage space, I find myself uploading common things I may need at home, work, and at friend’s houses, which all have internet access. Rather then carry a USB flash drive all the time or waste burning a CD, I found this add-on.

This extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (2.5 GB and growing) for file storage. It acts as an online drive, so you can upload files from your hard drive and access them from every Internet capable system.

It’s great for storing/sharing files with your friends. Also very good to backup photos and music files (as you can view/listen to them from Gspace).

To access the files at a later date, just login to your Gmail account. I’ve created labels to help organize the uploads, such as documents, photos, contracts, misc, and just archive them through Gmail. This is also great for students who don’t have access to USB ports on a school’s computer but need access to files, simply upload them to your Gmail account and login at whatever computer you are sitting at.

There are reports online that your average company worker wastes around 1.15 hours per day, a good chunk of which is surfing the internet. This is costing companies millions of dollars per year. If you are going to do it though, don�t get caught! Lifehacker has a great article out today on how to get a little more privacy while browsing at work. Their first suggestion is to get Firefox, if you don’t have it, get it for home for sure and so long as you are allowed to install software at work, put it on there. You can get the link on the right side of this site for Firefox at anytime.

The article can be found here.

A few things not mentioned:

• If you are getting up from your desk for any reason, even for a short bathroom break, hit Ctrl + Alt + Del and choose Lock Computer (Window only). The easiest way for someone to get snoopy with your private stuff is to sit at your desk. Locking your computer will not close any applications running but will require you to Ctrl + Alt + Del and then enter your password again.

• Don’t surf porn at work. That is the most sure fire way to get busted and fired. It is going to be really hard to explain to the unemployment office that you are trying to collect because you were trying to get porn at work instead of at home.

• Be aware of social networking sites like MySpace and Digg. A good portion of job recruiters are searching these social networking sites prior to hiring you, you can expect that there is a good chance that they will monitor them even after you are hired. Nearly all of these sites have timestamps on the. It will be very hard to come up with a story as to why you were posting a lame Own3d picture on your friends MySpace page instead of working.

• If you piss off your network admin, they will reign down on you and turn your life into hell. They have the ability to do everything from cut you off the internet completely to install key logging software to see everything you are typing.

• Ask for the policy on computer usage when you are hired or if a new boss is appointed to you. Many companies do not have a problem with using the internet or computer for personal use if you are not on their time, including before and after work and during your lunch hour. Better to know the rules prior to getting caught.

• Emptying your recycle can or trash can doesn’t always erase everything like you think it does. It’s not worth going into all the boring details, just be aware that when you erase things, they are not fully erased and could be retrievable. So don’t download anything you know you shouldn’t be.

• Be aware who you give your work email address to. We all have that one friend who has to forward you every stupid email in the world that you don’t want to read, that is someone you want to steer clear of. Again, the network admin can track how much email you are getting, where it is coming from and what is being attached to it. Likewise, try not to subscribe to too many non-work related email lists.