Back in the late 1990s at PRIOR Data Sciences I went over to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans as a contractor to help out with DFO's Y2K projects.
I was on site at DFO for several months. Each Friday I faxed my timesheet back to the engineering services manager and all was good. With no reason to go to the office which was across the bridge I didn't drop by and log in.
One day after several months away I was in the PRIOR office and logged in. I was amazed that there were over 100 unread email in my inbox during that time. Wow that seemed like a huge number. At that time we didn't have remote desktop, and OWA was just being launched. It took over an hour to wade through the messages.
Fast forward a few years to today. My last day of work for 2012 was Thursday last week. Since then in the following 4 days, only 2 of which were business days, there are now north of 200 unread emails in my inbox. I know this because of BlackBerry.
The 200+ messages are just those that got by the Outlook filters. Back at PRIOR there were no filters, every single email went to my inbox. Today I have dozens of folders and filters and more email gets filtered than gets through to inbox. Still 200 messages in 4 days, a few marked urgent.
It's a different world now. Back at PRIOR there wasn't much point sending an email over the weekend because nobody would see it until Monday. Today it is standard to send emails which expect a response during the evening and on weekends and it's not to get a head start on the next business day. What's the expectation when someone sends an urgent email on a Saturday afternoon? Is it considered bad form to generate urgent emails outside of regular business hours?
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