[contingencies]

Short emails tend to be either notifications, highly transactional (web based platforms are better for these as they can do tracking and trigger other outside actions), vague, or assume outside context.

These are the same problems as always-on corporate instant messaging platforms, just slightly improved by the cross-organizational functionality and store-and-forward.

IMHO organizations should strive to make email less like instant messaging and more like letters. Fully formed thoughts distributed less frequently and with more purpose.

In short, tax hassling others.

[yoavz]

Interesting take because there is a school of thought that comes to the opposite conclusion: emails should be more like text messages: http://five.sentenc.es/.

I think the most interesting part of this problem is the ambiguity in desired result. Emails are inherently unstructured text data, which results in conflict about how people want them to look like.