EVERYTHING
EMAILS
THE PREMISE
After drowning in thousands of emails, I made an experiment to consolidate redundant email lists. Through the digital chaos, the result was a new system that made emailing six times more efficient, which still lives on today.
THE STORY
Why Care About Emails?
1. Emails are useful for collective organizing to address social problems (especially in increasingly digital times).
2. Inefficient emailing wastes time and energy that could be used more productively and for more enjoyable tasks.
3. They're unavoidable. Whether you sign up to hear about job opportunities or communicate with friends or co-workers, you can't just turn off your email.
For more reading about emails, I recommend Cal Newport's "A World without Email."
Choose Your Format
You can read the full articles at The Daily Princetonian, but this page will briefly summarize them (and add some new insights from after they were published).
[PLT] Part 1: Why We Should Abolish the Res College Listservs
[PLT] Part 2: What We Learned from Spamming Your Inbox
The Problem: Six Redundant Email Lists
1. Students send emails six times. At Princeton University, students are placed into one of six residential colleges (i.e., dorm hall communities), and each res college has an email list, or "listserv." To reach the entire student population, one has to send to all six listservs.
2. The system is confusing to understand. Many people believe they can only send emails to their own res college listserv, but they can actually sign up for all six listservs* (barring one exception, First College).
3. Email volume is overwhelming. If each listserv receives 300 emails a month, subscribing to all six listservs (to be able to send to all six) is 1,800 emails a month (1,500 of which are redundant).
Solution 1: Email Instructional Guide
My first attempt was to write a guide to navigating the email lists. While people found it helpful, I found it insufficient because the system is still fundamentally flawed; it doesn't change the fact that sending out emails six times is the optimal strategy for outreach.
That being said, it was the guide that inspired me to start an instructional guide company, which you can read more about at Everything Instructions.
Solution 2: E-Mailman Service (Princeton Listserv Team)
What if instead of six separate email lists, we had one single email list? I brought in my friend, Andrew Wu, to simulate this by making him the "e-mailman" that would distribute all the emails to each list equally.
Enter the "Princeton Listserv Team" [PLT]:
1. I created a custom Gmail address.
2. Emails sent to the PLT email address would be forwarded to my friend, Andrew Wu, who would then forward that email to the six listservs.
3. At the bottom of every email would be a message with a FAQ on how to use the PLT service.
Resource Sharing
We also sent out two centralized spreadsheets that coordinated student roommate searches and informal selling of items, based on emails that came into the PLT. The spreadsheets garnered 1000+ combined views.
I joke that I was the master of the campus media, housing market, and economy all at the same time.
Problems and Solutions
Problem 1:
People felt like they were getting more emails.
Solution:
We compiled emails into a daily digest
Problem 2:
People used to predict email topics by who sent it, which was lost when Andrew Wu's name was the sender.
Solution:
We added subject tags like "[Sale]" or "[Event]" to the subject lines.
Problem 3:
People did not like seeing Andrew Wu's name so much.
Solution:
We tried changing Andrew's display name to "Princeton Listserv Team" for a day, but he also had to send emails outside of PLT. Some things can't be changed.
The Rise of [PLT]
The PLT quickly became the dominant form of emailing on campus. For the 1.5 months the PLT was running, the PLT was sending nearly 1/3 of listserv emails, or roughly 800 emails.
Reactions
Yet, the PLT was controversial. Many applauded the effort to make listservs easier to use, yet many people were confused by its sudden rise.
It spawned memes, anonymous online Tiger Confessions Facebook discussions, and even a YouTube tutorial of a student trying to explain email filters, humorously (though profanely).
PLT, surprisingly, even got banned from the student government election, in fear that students would be spammed with candidate emails; we made emailing too accessible. They eventually banned residential college listservs from the elections altogether.
Solution 3: Automation via HoagieMail
With Andrew and I graduating, there needed to be a replacement; people had come to rely on PLT to send emails. I reached out to the founder of Hoagie Apps, a web app developer group, and they managed to create a new platform: HoagieMail.
People could now use this web app to send emails to all six listservs automatically.
It's not ideal, since it still would make sense to only have one listserv as opposed to six. But is it much better? Certainly.
I'm not the creator of HoagieMail, but I'm glad that I set up the movement for it to succeed.
Media About HoagieMail
Three years after creation, HoagieMail still continues to be featured in many Daily Princetonian news articles, showing how much it has become a vital part of campus life:
"BSE courses need to match the tech revolution" [October 10, 2021]
The Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Princetonian cites HoagieMail as a key example for the campus technology revolution.
"What do Senior Sales actually sell? We looked at the numbers." [May 31, 2023]
HoagieMail continues to be the dominant form of informally selling items, akin to the spreadsheets circulated through PLT.
"Club recruitment fails to reach NCW students amid communication breakdown" [September 3, 2024]
A technical glitch in which HoagieMail could not send emails to the newest residential college's students is labeled as a "communication breakdown" for the 700+ affected students.
1. Put your point early and highlight it at the start of your title, paragraph, or sentence.
This is like how people could easily identify emails with the PLT [Subject Tags].
2. Don't check your inbox every minute.
Every time you check your email, you shift focus away from another task. Most emails do not expect people to respond in less than an hour.
Batching (e.g., checking your email only once an hour) is one strategy, and plug-ins like Boomerang can help you "pause" your inbox.
3. Organize your info stream using email filters or folders.
Gmail comes with "Primary," "Promotional," and "Social," but you can set more folders, and you can even set email rules to funnel emails directly into certain folders.
Emailing Tips and Tricks
