« And so it begins... | Main | Wish I had a stopwatch... »
April 03, 2007
E-mail is not "Five-9"s reliant
E-mail is not "Five-9"s reliant, although many companies and PR firms assume it is.
Let me translate that into English: E-mail is not as reliant as the legacy "POTS" telephone call. But many assume that it is -- at their own peril and/or headaches.
Time to get out the virtual whiteboard and explain further....
The term "Five-9s" and shorthanded by me here refers to the cliche/statement that such-and-such a thing is 99.999 percent reliable. So if we were talking about a telephone system, it would be NOT be available for less than 6 minutes a year...
(There's a whole school of thought about the "myth of the nines," but you get my point -- On any given day, and on most days of the year, you'll have dial tone and be able to place a phone call on a POTS line without breaking a sweat).
People have come to ASSUME the same reliability of e-mail -- on any given day, most days of the year, your e-mail message will get through.
Now, you KNOW that isn't true, correct?
Let me tell you my little Spring 2007 VON story to illustrate. Over the course of the four day event, news@vonmag.com -- the e-mail box for press releases -- received about 183 unique press releases that were published in the electronic newsletter. On some bizarre impulse, I checked the FILTERED e-mail folder on our web mail service and found two releases hung up in it. Filtered e-mail doesn't get POP'ed off (downloaded), so there's two e-mails missed right there.
Out of that raw sample, we come up with 98.9 percent reliability -- not even two nines, unless we round upward.
More disturbingly, I found a couple of e-mails from VON Mag's Director of sales in the DELETED items folder; the filters on my laptop labeled the inbound mail as SPAM. Why? I don't know, but I had to add her as a trusted user and now things are OK, but you see my point.
Unfortunately, there's no easy solution to this. E-mail is reliability enough, but not TOO reliable.
You could call everyone you send e-mail to, but that's time-consuming and could be annoying to the person you are calling (I received 57 e-mails before breakfast on Tuesday at Spring VON -- I don't have the time to even take a fraction of "confirm" phone calls).
Some PR firms have a knee-jerk habit of re-mailing if they see any sort of error message - this is not smart as in best-case, I now have double the releases. Worst case, this sort of mass-mail behavior trips a spam filter threshold and then NONE of their e-mail gets through.
Return-receipt-requested? No, that's also annoying if you have to pad through 57 e-mails before breakfast, and then someone on the receipt end has to match up receipts with a mailing list. Sounds non-trivial.
A second e-mail a few days later, asking if I received the first e-mail? (See above: 57 e-mails before breakfast).
Don't know if there is a solution to make everyone happy.
Posted by dmohney at April 3, 2007 09:16 PM