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Five email tics I'd love for you to lose

For the love of God, people; can we get the word out on these? Format courtesy of my other site.

  1. The liberal use of the "VERY HIGH PRIORITY!!!" flag
  2. The 18-line sig about all the Bad Things that will happen to me if I ever reveal the contents of your privileged, confidential (and unencrypted) message
  3. The unrequested press release (and the serial ignoring of the "Unsubscribe" I sent you for the previous seven press releases)
  4. The graphical background, font and table tags, and remaining 14k of HTML cruft associated with every. single. message. you've ever sent
  5. The including of my -- plus 98 other strangers' -- personal email addresses in the "To:" line of your friendly reminder about Tyler's birthday party

Friend: I love you, but you must evolve.

jthurman's picture

Along with overuse of the...

Along with overuse of the high-priority flag, I hate overuse of the "receipt acknowledgement" flag. When I read a message from certain people, outlook always pops up the dialog box saying "this person has requested acknowledgement that you have read their message." While I hate seeing that dialog, I'm glad it asks me if I want to send the acknowledgement, and I almost always click NO.

I can see a few cases where using the flag may be good - like today I got an invitation to a dinner party, and the sender said "let me know that you got this message, so I can count on you being there." In that case, it's basically an RSVP. The ACK flag would have been fine. Its people who attach the flag to every email they send that make me crazy, and they never get the acknowledgement they think they want. My REPLY to their email should serve as acknowledgement enough. (And I'm very good about replying to email. If I don't reply, they can assume I didn't get the message).

 
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