Nick Mehta writing in Mashable blames your overflowing email inbox and your desire to check in on it on — YOU! Yes, you loser, you are just too lonely, vain, anxious, and self-deceiving. Nick assumes somehow if you are social, self-effacing, calmly unparanoid and have a clear self-perception — tada! — your email problems will be solved.

Mashable but broken heart

Note to Nick: email comes to your inbox from somewhere other than yourself. Mostly not even from people, as I’ve seen in the past weeks are people are redirected to other more sane means of communications, but from various automatic mailings, alerts, confirmations, and the like. No psychological changes on your part will have much impact on the amount of email you receive. You may change your reading and responding habits, but there will be email as sure as the sun rises in the east.

Yes, I’m ranting this time and I hope uncharacteristically. I admit I’ve been infected with a rant-virus after having read the rants posing as comments following the WRAL interview. ;->

I have however read not only Nick’s article but also the ongoing Google+ discussion of that article lead by Luis Suarez. I invite you to join Luis and others in a very civil discussion of behaviors and email.

The bigger question looms: Can normative email behaviors of humans and of machines acting on behalf of humans be changed by charters, rules or by your own behaviors?