What Email Needs is Redundancy - RAE = Redundancy Aware Email

Wallah,

Why didn’t i think of it, but then again ... that’s why i am what i am and you are what you are,
Yes Dan, the Problem with Emails getting lost if for real, a small example..
Recently i got a email from a HR consultant regarding an Opening in A Big MNC, i replied but i did not get a conformation of the reply, Apparently the HR Team got busy with something else and did not reply, which lead me to a conclusion that they must have not received my email, i did resent it and again no reply,
Finally i had to give a call to the concerned person who in turn *WHANKED* me for sending so many copies of reply,

Obviously, this was not something that i cherish as an incident, but i prefer to refer to it as an accident,
Now again, i can not sustain these type of accidents everyday

Your solution is in a way, Ingenious, as of now i cant find something to improve and i think i might just be crazy enough to try and implement it sometime soon!

Nice one sir truly thought provoking!

Da GRaC!

To be a presence strictly on email is to be an unknown, a Nigerian spammer. In addition to Dan's idea, don't forget the follow-up call if you can afford it, or instant messaging.

I find worldwide phone calls cheap in Hong Kong. I bought a card for fifty HKD (about 6.00 USA) with several hours of talk anywhere in the developed, and most of the "underdeveloped" world.

I don't know if this is actually "cheap". Keep in mind that my ideas of what is affordable are in rapid evolution because I've had to live on less. But it does seem that the Asian market makes telecom a little more affordable that it is in the USA because USA people don't as a rule need to call internationally, while we in Asia often need to call outside our country of residence.

If you have a headhunter number, and he doesn't respond in about a week to your resume, consider calling him up, introducing yourself with a prewritten capsule description ("C++ and Oracle 5 years", etc) and asking about the status of your application. Of course, plan the call around time zones and his convenience. 10 AM is the best time to call.

Headhunters in the USA are a riot when I call, since they assume that I am Chinese and get ants in the pants about visas.

In my youth, an "executive recruiter's" interest meant you were Joe Slick. Nowadays, it means that we are, in T. S. Eliot's words, "men and bits of paper, whirled", in the Waste Land, from "Camden to Putney", or from the burning towers of Sep 11 today.

Sometimes one has to really wonder about SOME headhunters. They seem to be in a passionate search for the stupidest employee who can do the work, with the passion in the search having a negative sign. Their "passion", if that is the word, is rooting out any sign of any spunk in the prospective employee.

We lack a language outside of Theodore Adorno for negative passion but what attracted me to that gas-bag was that before reading Negative Dialectics, I saw it in operation in half-assed little offices in the Chicago loop.

Of course, the phenomenon of the labor contractor, the labor sub-contractor, and the recruitment agent is by no means limited to the USA. Instead, it makes a market out of despair throughout Asia.

In the early days of data processing, I thought how nifty it would be if one single IBM mainframe in Washington would link up all jobseekers with all jobs, and spare me my father's rousting me out of the sack in the morning with a copy of the want-ads, and the stern command to go forth and get a job.

I imaged sitting around the house reading improving books until the employer called, and implored me in dulcet tones to come to work for him.

Needless to say: this is a complete fantasy. It is even foolish, today, to register on Monster or Dice and then go to the beach. As you know, all good things take your level of effort.

I'm doing the Kung Fu Hustle myself in Hong Kong. They say it is good for you. It is.

An RA email client would also, of course, have an address book. Very interesting point b.t.w. Has it developped, or has it any perspectives? Looking to hearing from u.

Actually, I think a better technique for ensuring that emails go through would be to automatically have an email client sent a return receipt to the sender. Perhaps this would be an annoying waste of resources if your email client did this for every smap message, but surely someone could come up with a clever way to configure this.]

Perhaps you could config your system to return recipt everyone in your address book. Something like that.

Your client would also have a send status of every message you've sent. It would be easy for you to check this to see if an email was 1) received by the addressee's client and 2) read by the addressee, or 3) the addressee does not support sending you return receipts. The technical challenge for this would not be that great. Return receipt technology has been around since the early 90s at least, though to my knowledge it has never been used in quite this way.

I'd have to agree that receipts would be more effective than redundancy. To start with, there are a maximum of two communications, message and receipt, as opposed to a potentially unbounded number of communications. Then there is the whole issue of just why the email isn't getting through. Given that the vast majority of people would try to use RAE by setting up multiple accounts with one provider, I'll bet that success or failure would normally be an all or nothing proposition.

With respect to new development, I think that many email clients already support the concept of receive/read receipts. I know that Outlook does, and it honours the requests even when crossing corporate boundaries. Thus, all that is really necessary is for the sender to request a receipt and for the recipient to honour that request.

Very interesting. I totally agree with you and would find this very helpful. Is anything like this in the works?