Editor’s Corner
Draining the Email Swamp
O
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ASH Clinical News
N A TYPICAL WEEKDAY, I receive 200 emails and send 40. Un-
less you, dear reader, are the taciturn Seattle hematologist who
hasn’t responded to any of my emails since 2014, your incom-
ing and outgoing electronic communication volume is likely
similar. (If you are that guy, there is no longer any need to reply
to speaking invitation from 2015).
This deluge is a big problem for all of us. How big? Let’s
assume that 17 waking hours each day are potential emailing
time. Granted, predatory publishers never seem to rest, but it
still is fairly rare for a human to send an email from the depths
of REM sleep. If your email volume is similar to mine, then on
average you have an “email movement” every 4 minutes and 15
seconds. Per the National Cancer Institute’s Common Toxicity
Criteria, that is a clear case of grade 4 diarrhea, requiring urgent
intervention.
Once upon a time, email was exciting. I was an early adopter
of electronic messaging: I sent my first binary-encoded missive
in the 1970s via the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects
Agency Network), the Internet’s predecessor. The message was a
simple “Hello!” to a family friend, typed under parental supervi-
sion on a Texas Instruments Silent 700 data terminal that used a
heat-transfer printer and roll of paper instead of a display screen.
By 1982, I had saved up enough money from my Newark Star-
Ledger paper route to add a 300-baud VICMODEM to my Com-
modore VIC-20 home computer. Today, a dial-up modem like
that seems as archaic a way of transmitting information as the
medieval hand-copied books in the Bodleian Library, but back
then, the ability to reach someone electronically at any speed was
radical, heady stuff.
In 1984, I upgraded to a 1,200-baud Mitey Mo modem
for the Commodore 64. Mitey Mo felt dazzlingly fast, like the
Reagan-era version of FiOS. My sisters were a little miffed
after Mitey Mo arrived because Mo tied up the only household
telephone line for hours, so I eventually had to get a dedicated
phone line. It was worth it: Those sizzling 1,200 bits per second
opened a whole new world of bulletin board system traffic and
messaging – and also exposed me to some sinister characters,
the forerunners of today’s internet trolls, griefers, and other
maladjusted anonymous sociopaths.
Thirty years later, email has degenerated from a “totally
awesome,” Mitey Mo–era novelty to a reliable source of irrita-
tion for all of us. Checking our inboxes is a constant inducer
of gastroesophageal reflux and repetitive strain injury. We all
spend far too much time staring at screens, thinking about how
to reply tactfully to communications that both lack nuance and
never seem to stop coming. I’ve done what I can to rein in my
own email beast, but there’s only so much one can do when
even the simple act of scheduling a patient’s follow-up visit for
a few lab tests can require 15 or more emails – not counting the
requisite “Thanks!” to all and sundry for doing their jobs.
Ruthlessly unsubscribing from mailing lists helps keep the
deluge a bit more manageable. If I simply erase all those mes-
sages and never unsubscribe, they just keep piling up; eventual-
ly there is so much inbox clutter that I am liable to accidentally
delete something important when pounding on that key like a
sewing-machine needle.
Once, trying to cut down on the dozens of daily emails about
serious adverse events and trial amendments for studies I wasn’t
involved with, I went just a little too far and unsubscribed from
my center’s Institutional Review Board. Thankfully, our leukemia
program’s regulatory team real-
ized what I had done and saved
me from a major headache.
I avoid clicking “unsub-
scribe” on emails from bogus
conferences and fee-hungry
open-access journals. For those
unwanted emails, I’m convinced
that the futile act of trying to
unsubscribe only serves to
David Steensma, MD, is an
confirm to the spammer that an
institute physician at the Dana-
email address is valid. Instead,
Farber Cancer Institute and
I’ve built an elaborate group of
associate professor of medicine at
Outlook rules and macros to
Harvard Medical School.
ensure anything with solicita-
tion buzzwords like “peptide
synthesis” or “antibody cata-
log” is automatically moved to “Trash” – as do missives from
the OMICS Publishing Group, Bentham Open, or any of the
countless other purveyors of crap journals whose names sound
plausible but are just a little off. I still haven’t figured out how
to create a macro to delete any email with the subject, “Awaiting
your esteemed and beloved research” and its numerous awk-
ward, misspelled variants that are hallmarks of publisher spam.
I’ve often wondered where predatory publishers get
our email addresses. Do bots troll medical journals behind
paywalls to harvest email addresses from the Corresponding
Author section of papers? PubMed used to include email ad-
dresses of corresponding authors in online abstracts, but the
National Center for Biotechnology Information wised up and
has not done that in years. To elude bots, I tried submitting
manuscripts with the tell-tale “@” symbol spelled out as “AT”,
but it didn’t seem to help. I suppose academics’ email address-
es are like ill-advised text messages or nude photos: Once it’s
out there, it’s always out there.
Some of the spam emails are good for a laugh. I recently
received an email from a journal requesting my “delighted
contribution” for a special issue on Farber disease, a rare
lysosomal storage disease about which I’ve never published
anything remotely relevant. Presumably I received this invita-
tion only because I work at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. I
wonder what the symptoms of Dana-Farber disease might be.
Developmental delay in academic promotions? (Promotion is
so hard to achieve around here that we joke – uncomfortably –
about Instructor Emeritus status.) Expensive parking? Or, more
likely, an overwhelming sense of inadequacy in the presence of
numerous brilliant local colleagues?
Every publication can bring an onslaught of odd invitations.
A review article in which I briefly mentioned the marrow micro-
environment “seed-versus-soil” debate unexpectedly led to dozens
of come-ons from open-access agricultural journals. Invitations
from food-safety journals quickly followed my Leukemia Research
paper that mentioned the connection between clonality and ba-
nana cultivars. And a historical article I wrote 15 years ago about
the origin of Congo red staining for amyloid earned me an invita-
tion to several faux conferences on African policy; as a hematolo-
gist I would have felt qualified to speak only on the problem of
blood diamonds. One wonders what sort of mayonnaise-related
spam I would be receiving if I were still at Mayo Clinic.
Continued on page 16
November 2018