Has email become too much of a hassle?

Sure, I still send a few emails at work. Since we don’t have a corporate intranet at work, I mostly use email to move files back and forth. Microsoft Messenger has nearly replaced personal email for me. My closest friends and coworkers are on my Messenger contact list and I never email them. I wonder when business cards will start including Messenger/Yahoo/ICQ names?

Only a handful of people at my work are “authorized” to run the real version of MSN Messenger. Everyone else can run the web version which isn’t very good. I don’t know why our company goes out of its way to keep people from communicating with each other.

Email has become a big pain in the butt with all the spam, viruses and scams being passed around. I run Outlook with a its built in spam filter which works pretty well. I also run an Outlook plug-in called SpamBayes that adds another layer of spam killing and protection. I then have my popmail checker ban email from certain domains like yahoo.com and hotmail.com before they even hit Outlook. The only time I seem interested in email anymore is when I’m passing on a resume for a friend or expecting an insurance or car quote.

Remember when email was so simple? I’d fire up Pegasus Mail and could nearly always expect a response from my friends. I’m convinced that the closer the friend, the less likely he/she is to reply to an email. They must figure they will catch me on Messenger and say hello.