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Comment by mgrouchy | Hacker News Reader

Is this actually a problem for more people then this guy?

I literally don't know anyone who has 10000 contacts, I also don't know anyone who actually needs 10000 contacts.

Considering Google automatically adds anyone I have an email conversation with to my contacts, I would say one day we will all get to this point, some just sooner then others. And I can think of nothing more painful then trying to prune through 10,000 contacts to figure out which ones I'd want to keep.

Maybe? I have been basically living in gmail since the start of the beta and I have < 500 contacts and I have never deleted a contact and use my email very heavily.

I'm sure in 5+ years I may get to this point, but in a year or 2 or 5, who says what this arbitrary upper limit is. Google seems to increase capacity on just about everything else, I dont see why this would be different.

I just checked and I have 2500 contacts just my virtue of using GMail for mailing list. I probably care about less than 100 of those.

There's things like contacts for every Debian and CPAN bug I've ever filed, contacts for people who change their E-Mail address every day due to using some wildcard catch + script to generate them etc.

Considering Google automatically adds anyone I have an email conversation with to my contacts, I would say one day we will all get to this point, some just sooner then others.

My "My Contacts" list is more than 500 people after using Gmail since September 2006, and my "Other Contacts" is more than 1100 people. So if I had work that involved even more email interchange than the work I have, I could easily get to that 10,000 limit. And if a person makes a lot of use of email, that is precisely the person who will comparison-shop for different email solutions.

Some people have jobs which have them make five to ten new business contacts in an average workday. No, they're not becoming best friends or anything, they're just exchanging business cards. Still, that's only five to ten years of that kind of work.

The thing is that people don't know ahead of time which contacts they need. They just put everyone they meet in their contacts. Then if someone says, "Hey, do you know so-and-so?" they can actually email or call that person right away.

I consider that spam.

It's called sales and networking. And it's valuable.

The traditional process of "sales" doesn't provide nearly as much value as it once did. We now have google and more efficient social networking available as a means of locating solutions to various business problems one may have.

I remember the halcyon days of the dot com era when hot redheaded sales reps from Exodus would take you on datacenter tours and treat you to dinner to secure a lucrative two-rack deal.

I remember pushy but friendly Oracle salespeople selling you on a $250k six-processor O7 license predicated on "well ebay's using it".

Nowadays I refuse to take vendor phone calls. If I need a solution, I google it or ask around my circle of tech friends.

The claim that sales is "valuable" is lost on me at this point.

They still have that sort of sales process in other industries.

I know a girl who works for a company that sells Expensive Things to a Big Lumber Company. Her full time job is to be fun to be around. Every weekend you'll find her and a few random BigCo executives (or formen depending on the weekend) riding jetskis, snowboarding or just buying rounds of tequila at the Mexican restaurant. Her office is at the BigCo plant.

It still happens in tech too. Drive past the Microsoft campus next time you're in Redmond. Notice how Intel has an office building next door?

I this case though people probably give him there details in expectation of getting in on something at some point if they are the right fit, whether it be mentoring, investing or deals startups and them. Doubt hes going, "need investors?, here I'll spam out 1000 of them".

Yes, most definitely. I set up gmail to automatically add everyone I reply to to my contact list and in my job today I often get 5-10 e-mails per day from potential customers, investors, partners, etc (sometimes many more). I have to be able to follow up with any one of them at any point, and while I don't need to have them in my contact list (I can search for their e-mail and copy-paste their address), it would make my job much more frustrating and time consuming. I haven't hit the 10k limit yet, but I suspect I will relatively soon. This is actually a very common use case for a huge number of business customers, it's certainly not an isolated edge case.

Sounds like an application for a database or CRM system of some sort so that you can age out the old entries. How many contacts from 3 year ago are still relevant?

True, but a similar argument applies to e-mail. How many e-mails from three years ago are still relevant? The main value proposition of GMail when it came out was that you never have to delete email anymore. Why not do the same with contacts and take the hassle out of it?

Besides, most modern CRM/ERM systems interact with e-mail (where you bcc the CRM system to add data to it). So adding a CRM system only exacerbates the problem.

It depends on what you do. Personally, I'm a pretty meticulous filer, I keep lots of paper and digital records, filed in filesystems so I can figure out wtf happened 3 or 5 years ago. (I'm a manager in a large IT organization)

Ancient email is often important to establish the context surrounding decisions that have multi-year impact.

Also, many folks use email as an ad hoc general filing system. They rely on search to find information, and email is often the ONLY system available with reasonable search ability.

If you're in a small company, this will sound insane. But in a mega-sized org like the one I work in, its essential.

You could also just keep track of about everyone you ever talked to. Just keep the contact in some database with some notes/references about him. Always better to just loose/delete the contact.

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