I’ll admit it: I have an e-mail problem.

At this moment, there are 1,944 unanswered messages in the Inbox of my private account, and 2,730 in the Inbox of my public account. And that’s after taking a deep breath and deleting all the unanswered ones from 2008 and 2009, which I realized would be too embarrassing to answer anyway.



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I’m a special case, of course. My e-mail address is published everywhere, and I write about a subject that’s among the most baffling in the world — technology. Many people write me in hopes of getting “what should I buy” advice, seeking “how do I fix it” information or just responding to something they’ve read.

Still, I’m not the only one with an e-mail problem. Among my friends, many have hundreds or thousands of messages sitting unanswered at this moment. It’s a broken system, for sure.

Yesterday, someone posted a Web site called emailcharter.org. It’s 10 principles that are designed to ease the problem.

This isn’t a new idea; you can find similar articles all over the Internet. (You can also find “zero-inbox” advocates online: people who advocate filing all e-mail every day, so you always leave work with an empty Inbox. To me, though, that’s just a self-fakeout. You’re just shuffling the same unanswered messages into folders.)

What is new, though, is that the “someone,” in this case, is Chris Anderson, who runs the high-profile TED conferences. Both the speakers and the audiences for this conference are exactly the kind of well-known influencers — with bulging In boxes — that might help him start a movement.

The Charter site goes like this: “E-mail overload is something we are inadvertently doing to each other. You can’t solve this problem acting alone. You will end up simply ignoring, delaying, or rushing responses to many incoming messages, and risk annoying people or missing something great. That prospect is stressful.”

Instead, Mr. Anderson sets out 10 principles that he hopes the world will adopt. They range from the general (“Respect recipients’ time”) to the very specific (“If your e-mail message can be expressed in half a dozen words, just put it in the subject line, followed by EOM (= End of Message). This saves the recipient having to actually open the message”).

(I strongly agree with his corollary to that one: ending a note with “no reply necessary” is a generous act.)

My favorite items are this one: “Let’s mutually agree to cut each other some slack. Given the e-mail load we’re all facing, it’s O.K. if replies take a while coming” and this one about clarity: “ Start with a subject line that clearly labels the topic. . . . Avoid strange fonts and colors. “

A couple of them make me shrug. I don’t mind people wrapping up a discussion with a “Got it!” or “Great — thanks,” which is one of Anderson’s peeves. To me, it confirms that everybody’s on board and that the discussion is complete. And I get a tiny bit of satisfaction hitting Delete.

On the other hand, there are some items I’d love to see added to the Charter. For example:

11. Don’t Use Mailblocks. You might think that you’re clever by signing up for one of those anti-spam services that require e-mail senders to take a test on a Web page, proving that we’re human. But you have a lot of nerve sending me an e-mail question — and then blocking my reply. I don’t have time to take your little humanity test. The worst part: I don’t discover that you’re blocking my reply until AFTER I’ve gone to the trouble of writing it.

12. Use BCC for Your E-mail Blasts. When you send out jokes or those insipid ‘heartwarming’ anecdotes, don’t just put everyone you know into the To: line. Instead, put all your addressees into the BCC (blind carbon copy) line. We’ll still get your e-mail blast, but we won’t see each others’ e-mail addresses. You’re preserving our privacy and saving us the scrolling through six inches of address information.

13. Clean Up Your Forwards. On the same topic (jokes and insipid tales): before you pass them on, clean up those carets (>>>>>>) that have accumulated from all the forwarding. They make the things impossible to read. (Paste the message into Word; use Find and Replace to search for the “>” character and replace it with nothing.)

14. Omit the Legal Vomit. I roll my eyes at the nine-sentence legal disclaimer that some companies insist on stamping at the bottom of every single message. I’ve got news for you: that confidentiality disclaimer has never wound up protecting a company from whatever it’s supposed to protect them from. When your actual e-mail message is only a fraction as long as your legal disclaimer, you look like an idiot.

15. Intersperse Your Replies. If you’re replying to a message that had a lot of different statements or questions, consider clicking after each response-requiring sentence, hitting Return, and typing your answer there. The result looks like a conversation, and makes it clear what you’re referring to. (But if you’re supplying only one response, put it up top so we don’t have to scroll down.)

I’m sure you have a few suggestions of your own; I’d love to read them in the Comments.

In the meantime: yes, e-mail is out of control. Yes, we need some guidelines. Yes, I’ve signed Chris Anderson’s charter, and I think we should all help to spread the word.