This post is the result of reading a bit of advice in one of my RSS feeds today from one of the leading and most respected blogs on the Internet. In itself the information could be considered trivial but the potential for career disaster or personal embarrassment for anyone suffering from email overload ( and that must be many of us) was immense. It got me quite incensed, maybe this is the engineer/researcher in my makeup, but everything needs to be considered in the cold light of day for its real worth.

The post in question was quite simply about prioritising email using rules, whether this is an Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or your favorite email program. In this particular instance the advice was that emails sent directly to you are more important than emails sent to a group.

My instant response is why!

The suggestion is that an email sent to you rather than a group can only be answered by you and is therefore more important. That seems to be a blindingly narrow and wrong view of emails in general.

Let me a give a simple example:

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