Rick Moen wrote:
I seldom point out the fallacy of a technical workaround to a social problem these days.
Edwards's Law
"You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem." Nobody seems to know who Edwards was, but pretty much the entire system administrator profession rests on the implicit assumption that he/she was egregiously mistaken.
In general I agree with you, but... I haven't pointed it out before now, but the users in question are inmates in Australian prisons. Their communications access to the outside world is (necessarily) curtailed, which is why they have no IM or SMS. They have email, but it is heavily embargoed and monitored, and the monitoring staff are getting overwhelmed by these "SMS-like" mails. I assume the prisons deploy social solutions as well as the technical solutions I've been discussing, but I suspect some of the inmates are there because they do not respond well to social solutions :-) I don't expect adding a delay will STOP inmates sending "SMS-like" emails, but I think/hope the delay will reduce their number from "overwhelming" to "manageble".