An interestingly obnoxious thing happened at Sun yesterday. Somebody mistakenly set up an email alias that broadcast a message to a very broad audience at Sun – perhaps the whole company. A few replies to that email were also broadly distributed, triggering a literal avalanche of angry responses, saying “take me off this list,” sometimes in rather interesting ways. Needless to say, my “Delete” key got a bit of extra service last night.

The most interesting response to the flood of superflous email was a link to an article entitled, “No E-Mail Fridays Transform Office,” discussing one company’s unique policy to prohibit email exchanges each Friday. This policy was an attempt to get people talking to each other again, rather than using the familiar, but often mis-used email crutch.

The article mentioned that “The volume of e-mails has exploded in recent years with over 170 billion now being sent daily around the globe, according to technology market researcher Radacati Group. That’s two million every second.”

The Sun email servers coped nicely with the little volume explosion today, but it’s probably a good thing a 2mb file wasn’t attached to that initial email! I suppose the original sender of the rogue email message wished emails would have been banned at Sun yesterday.

This is a great example of how a small mistake can have a huge effect in the Participation Age. In the words of Sergeant Phil Esterhaus of Hill Street Blues fame (now that really shows my age), “Hey, let’s be careful out there!”

PS. Don’t you love the graphic designed by Hamza?

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