Making email worse

I didn't think it was possible - but it is. [Link]

Email is broken because it’s far easier to send someone a message that creates work for them than it is for them to  do that work. So you can quickly make the lives of people worse, at little cost to yourself.

Today, not responding to email is implicitly stating that your note was not important enough to warrant a response. That’s appropriate! Not everything everyone thinks or says merits a response. What we want in life is less, not more email, right?

Yet a startup called Rebump has found a way to make email even worse. How is that possible, you ask.? Well, Rebump is a service that automatically re-pings people — via email, of course — that haven’t answered your original message. It will keep doing so until you get a response.

Note that this implies that your initial email was both worth reading, and worth replying to. In reality most email fails both tests. So, Rebump is essentially a brilliantly passive aggressive way to force people into responding to you, or the flood of notes will not fucking stop.

Using my psychic powers, I sense that anyone using this will end up in the spam folder.