How to read your email
Should you read your email from the oldest message to the newest or should you start with the most recent and work backwards?
This is the question posed by Jack Toerson 
.
It’s an interesting variation on the top-posting vs. bottom-posting debate and raises a “philosophical problem” as Jack explains:
If you read the newest messages first they may contain references to things contained in the older messages, but if you read the oldest messages first they may contain information that has been superseded by the older messages.
He provides a colourful example which illustrates the dilemma.
I know what I do. You can probably guess. What do you do?
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Tags: efficiency, email, philosophy of email, Productivity
April 22nd, 2006 at 5:50 am
That should end with “superseded by the newer messages”.
I normally read mail, news, etc. oldest-to-newest unless newer items deserve more immediate attention or clearly supersede older ones that can be skipped and/or deleted.
My actions depend on the context, with self-justified reasons (hmm). Often there’s no single “(in)correct” way, such as with top/bottom/inter-posting. I’m always looking for and interested in fresh “gee, I hadn’t considered that” ideas that positively influence what I do and how I do it in the future… even if I choose not to adapt them. And the most satisfaction can be in sharing knowledge regardless of how I relate to it.
I filter shallow claims that some ways or things are “best/worst” or “right/wrong” with extreme prejudice. If not backed with convincing supporting evidence they’re quite easily dismissible. Mocking my depth of my experience about certain things is futile unless they genuinely expose my blind spots and ignorance.
I have a passionate, “go ahead, show me otherwise” Germanic stubbornness that can be particularly annoying or intimidating to people who don’t understand it or know me better. :-)
Darn, Tim, you’ve gotta stop posting things that inspire my rants on your weblog. :-D
April 22nd, 2006 at 8:38 am
That’s the bind, isn’t it?
How do you know if the newer ones deserve more immediate attention unless you read them first?
April 22nd, 2006 at 9:03 am
This is where a mailer that organises mail nicely by thread is so important, because you can at least see that there is later message (e.g. it’s not 100 emails down the list).
I read oldest-to-newest, because that makes most sense, but complete reading (the thread) before replying/actioning.
April 25th, 2006 at 7:26 am
I read oldest to newest most of the time. I don’t run into dilemma because I see others in thread via the list view.
What I think is more of an interesting preference, is whether people like to have newer messages at the top of the list window or at the bottom.
I like newest messages to appear at the bottom.
April 25th, 2006 at 10:12 am
Intuition? :)
The sender/subject/date of newer messages can of course be a clue. And priority depends on the content; you might be anticipating personal/business messages whereas mailing list traffic is typically unpredictable. It’s an ongoing readjustment of context-dependent attention focus.
Same here. Not possible with Gmail, being one of several key reasons I’m not comfortable using that service.
April 25th, 2006 at 10:29 am
Naturally, being a top-poster, I am perverse about this too.
I like me newest at the top. It’s like working through the in-tray from the top to the bottom.
April 25th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
Ahh, ’tis simply a difference in our FIFO (me) vs. LIFO (you) preferences. :)
April 25th, 2006 at 5:55 pm
Well, you learn something every day. :)
I didn’t know that.
April 26th, 2006 at 1:40 am
The simple answer would be to implement tags for email. There could be a ‘nasty surprise tag’, an ‘ebullient praise’ tag and a ‘this isn’t important’ tag. The standard priority header isn’t descriptive enough and is over-used.
Thanks for the link :-).
- Jack
April 26th, 2006 at 7:45 am
Are you suggesting tags for outgoing messages, Jack? I don’t see how that really adds value beyond what you can already do by simply adding freeform tag-like info to the Subject header.
April 26th, 2006 at 8:03 am
I think the problem with a subject heading is that often their is no agreed upon or mutual understanding of what it may mean. Unless the language is very staid. Of course mailing lists often add square bracketed tags to their outgoing mail, but that’s really an identifier of source rather than content; the mailing list may have been spammed. If there were an agreed upon urgency weighting for various terms in subject headers it would be a different case.
Although it’s still pretty flawed because they rely on the user supplying the correct information. The number of Viagra requests I get that are marked urgent is phenominal, and have no erectile problems. I suppose someone could digitally sign a messages priority and the recipient were only to trust authenticated priorities the spam ‘false-priority’ syndrome may be somewhat limited. However the priority would have to be concatenated with a message digest prior to signing to stop people cutting and pasting priorities from a authentic message to a forgery.
But then there’s the problem of people who may not have public keys available or are malicious users who have public keys. There’s no way enough people signing each-others keys to rely on a sense of trust. Almost everything I think of in this regard leads to another question, and I’m not very technical, and I haven’t entirely thought it through. I’m just tossing ideas to the wind. Thanks for the reply.