Grunt Work


My mom works at a place where they handle their email system internally. They don’t use any sort of cloud-hosted email. They have their own domain and have @company.com email addresses, and the email servers are set up locally at the brick-and-mortar business. 

She just gets hammered with spam, and has for years. 

Something like a 100 spam messages a day. I’m sure some of it is junk-not-spam mail that she could slowly fight. But plenty is honest-to-god spam. And so she deals with it by hand every day. Making very sure she isn’t missing or accidentally deleting customer emails, as she is in sales and email is a huge part of her job. 

I try not to think about it much as there isn’t anything I can do and it doesn’t seem to severely hurt her ability to do her job anyway. I think it’s just the idea of grunt work that bothers me. Hand deleting spam is grunt work, and computers should be doing all grunt work for us. 

It also just surprises me because in the small-tech-business world I live in, you never see this kind of thing.  You see people use G Suite, which is entirely hosted online, easy to admin, gives you email, calendar, storage and a bunch of apps, for 5 bucks a person. Or Microsoft Exchange which starts at just 4 bucks, or 12.50 if you want all the apps. 

It’s not just the price of those that seems like such an obvious win, but the quality. Your employees won’t be hand deleting spam.


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