To summarize, the technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are underdeveloped. The notion that all messages, regardless of purpose or sender, arrive in the same undifferentiated inbox, and that there’s an expectation that every message deserves a (timely) response, is absurdly unproductive. The sender filter is a small but useful step toward a better state of affairs, and is an idea whose time has come—at least for the increasing number of entrepreneurs and freelancers who both receive a lot of incoming
...more