These are just two examples out of countless attempts at media contact over a two to three month period. How many others were simply relegated to the digital "circular file" and never even seen? Well, during this two to three month period, these were the only two contact attempts that I actually received a response to, out of dozens that were sent out.

So what's the solution? I have no idea, but I CANNOT accept the death of email. We must save it. How many of you business and IT personnel out there rely on email for your daily operations? How would your business change if you had to go back to relying on the telephone and fax as your primary contact methods? Mine would die. At ZATZ, we have a considerable number of overseas contacts. These relationships would die simply due to the cost of international calling rates if we had to rely on the telephone for our information sharing. [Well, we're not that cheap, but getting up way early in the morning is a pain. -- DG]

Let's get behind email again, and make an attempt to save it. The first step would be to not let those contact attempts die in the Junk folder or Trash. Every email I receive gets at the very least the courtesy of having the Subject line read, just to make sure I'm not missing something.

And I'm glad I take this extra step, because if I didn't, I would have lost countless business contacts and reader emails. It only takes a few minutes to scan the subject to make sure I'm not missing something I'd like to have. It's well worth those few minutes when you find that "diamond" in the digital "rough" that erroneously got tagged as Junk.

Email is in Code Blue right now, let's give this old friend the CPR it needs for a second chance.

Contributing Editor Bill Mann is a freelance technology writer/instructor who has trained over 2000 people in the use of Microsoft Outlook. Check out his book, "How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007" on Amazon.com. For more on Outlook, visit his website at http://www.living-with-outlook.com. You can also write him at Outlook2007@techforyou.com.