Ever send a message that never got answered?
During one of my family's many moves, we left some of our stuff at a storage company. Their security system included a key-code box at the front entrance which would unlock the gate some 20 feet beyond. It had a red light that would blink on if you typed your code wrong. If you typed the code correctly, "a green light would blink on" would have been the right answer. But there was no green light. If you typed the code correctly, the red light didn't come on.
But then, if you just typed the whole thing wrong and didn't even enter a valid code, the red light didn't come on, and then you'd drive up to the gate, find it still locked, and have to jump out of your car and walk back to try again. The second or third time, you'd be feeling really dumb and you'd have to go talk to the gate guard who would tell you they'd changed your code. You needed to type a pound sign first. That activated the system, see?
The point is "feedback." Any good system will have feedback for positive and negative conditions. And maybe even preliminary feedback for 'pending' conditions.
Email is a bad system in that regard. Under ideal circumstances, you'll send an email and get a response. But more commonly, you send an email and get no response. Sometimes, you'll send an email and get an error message. But not every error results in an error message. (And some errors are delayed for days or even weeks in resend loops and other technical whirlpools.) So you never know.
Outlook takes a funny approach to fixing this with the "read receipt" system. It's an attempt to provide active feedback for every sent email. The problem is, it relies on the client of the user and most people don't have it setup for that to work. The really funny part of it is that the same system also provides a "retract email" function that works the same way -- and is crippled by the same reliance on the recipient's client. I laugh every time I get a "recall the last message" email because I've disabled that function so I get to see the whole chain.
But is there a better answer to this problem?
In Speaking Into the Air, John Durham Peters examines a more general instance of the problem of "disseminated communications." It's a great book, full of interesting metaphor and discussion, but ultimately it didn't tell me how to fix the problem of email. It did help me realize that the greater problem includes such issues as:
Even if the message shows up in someone's in-box, how do I know they read it?
Even if they read it, how do I know it conveyed my ideas accurately to them?
Even if it conveyed my ideas, were my ideas worth conveying?
I think most of what I say is pretty unimportant to most of the world. But to the people to whom it matters most, I'm usually able to get through somehow.