The great email floods: January 25, 1999 issue of New Thinking

January 25, 1999 New Thinking:
The great email floods

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January 25, 1999

The great email floods

By Gerry McGovern

As each days passes, the great river of email swells. Already, isolated flash floods have occurred. Most organizations and individuals have hardly even considered the consequences should the flood come their way.

Some look and observe a stream. Some don’t even look. But the ice on the mountain of information overload is melting faster than most of us recognize.

Most of us have not observed the gathering of the waters. A great majority of organizations and individuals, not really understanding the Internet, have put little or no plans in place, have dug no channels for the email river.

1999 will be the year of the Great Email Floods. Bitter lessons will be learned.

Consider the omens.

Before January 7 1999, the American Senate, with its 100 senators, was receiving an average of 70,000 emails per day; that’s an average of 7,000 emails per day per senator. With the commencement of the impeachment trial of President Clinton, the overall number rose to 500,000 per day. (The American House of Representatives was receiving over 1 million message per day last Autumn.)

Knight Ridder News Service reported that this flood of email was, “overloading the computer system responsible for delivering them to electronic mailboxes. E-mails are arriving hours, even days and weeks, after constituents send them – when they arrive at all.”

“It's been rendered almost useless,” Tara Andringa, spokeswoman for Senator Carl Levin, told Knight Ridder. “We've been told not to rely on the e-mail system and not to use it to respond to constituents.”

When the Stephen King website launched, it was expected that there might be a couple of hundred emails per day. When the figure reached flood levels at over 1,600 per day, it was time for damage control.

The website announced that, “Due to the overwhelming flood of e-mail, which Stephen's assistants are wading through, we are temporarily suspending e-mail sent to his office. Please check back when they've had a chance to get caught up.'' The future plan is to have discussion boards and that email communication will no longer be accepted.

Brightware carried out a survey of the Fortune 100 companies, asking them a simple question: “What is your mailing address?” The just published results found that one third of the companies didn’t respond at all. Only 4 percent responded within 15 minutes, while for a further 26 percent, it was not possible to find an email address on their website to send the simple question to.

A recently published study of Internet users by the Pew Research Center found that email, “continues to be the top Internet draw.” For those out there with a high or potentially high public profile, your ‘Impeachment Day’ will come.

You may think that email to you is a trickle. You may even recognize that it is a swelling river. But one of these days, something will happen to push the big button of public interest or anger at something you have done – or maybe not even done, but the public ‘thinks’ you did. Then, you will face your very own Great Email Flood.

You have been warned.

Gerry McGovern

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