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Corporate Email Etiquette - Dead or Alive?
mbravo writes "I work in a largish company, heavily into IT, and in a complex and quickly changing market. Employees are predominantly in the 30 or younger age-bracket, and as you might expect we rely on a lot of internal e-mail. Despite that, lately I'm finding myself increasingly frustrated by a complete lack of e-mail etiquette in the company. A typical thread might look like a hundred-message-long chain of one-line replies, with full quoting and hundreds of recipients in the 'To:' field. It feels like it is happening more and more often. I don't seem to be seeing much success in explaining to my co-workers what the problem is here. How do you deal with this at your place of business, and does your company care? Does the company take any policing or educating measures?"
With Gmail. It's intelligent filters screen out the quoted text, and by displaying email as threads (aka conversations) instead of just chronologically it makes dealing with a large volume of correspondence much easier. It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than any other email system I've used.
A-Bomb
My experience in the defense industry has shown me that long, full-quote e-mails are often useful for defending yourself against another's incompetence.
I don't seem to be seeing much success in explaining to my co-workers what the problem is here.
Perhaps there is no problem... Or maybe you are the problem...
I encourage everyone to be wary when writing e-mails. If your firm ever gets sued, all that becomes discoverable, and attorneys have to read through all your e-mails and documents to look for interesting things. Avoid long threads and stick with short, clear e-mails. Lots of one-liners leads to situations where a vague line looks incriminating when taken out of context.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I just wish that my co-workers could learn to spell and use decent grammar. Not would, could.
Love sees no species.
That will solve most problems with quotations..
Because the perception that email is "free" nobody in management really cares. The only thing they worry about is inappropriate stuff.
Yes, they need educating.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Sounds like what you really need is a company IM server. Install a Jabber server and client for the company LAN and you'll probably have a lot less 1 line e-mails as it's just easier to handle that sort of thing over e-mail. They're using e-mail as something it isn't designed for because they don't have anything better. If that doesn't fix it, I guess you could always LART a few key personnel. Maybe you could put a filter on the e-mail server that rejects any message less than 100 characters (non-quoted) and just tell everyone it's a new spam filter.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
I don't seem to be seeing much success in explaining to my co-workers what the problem is here.
Well, what is the problem? Do you just not like long e-mail threads, or is there a legitimate concern here?
Convincing them there's a legitimate problem, aside from your ideal form of etiquette, ought to be step one. Otherwise - why would random_employee_002 do anything different?
Just configure an *inernal* phpBB (and secure it FTLOG!!) forum and make people post there. If you have long conversation threads then it might be good to have them in a forum instead of clogging the mail (and that way you can prevent mail leaks.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Who will be the first to reply with a short one-liner quioting someone else's reply?
V Droll
Full quotes are just a fact these days, and as much as I hate them, they're there for a reason: With role accounts and many concurrent tasks, people simply need a quick way to see the "history" of an email exchange, beyond their own mail account. The inclusion of everything isn't so much for themselves, it's for their colleague who eventually takes over the thread.
If your problem is that your mail server can't handle all these mails, it's time to upgrade the mail server and/or switch to different software.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Part of the problem is that there are two distinct ways people commonly do quotations in email. The quick and lazy way is to just hit reply, quoting the sender's entire message below, and write your reply above. The more precise way is to quote specific lines from the original message and write your reply below each set of lines. What I really hate is when the two methods get mixed. For example, I use the more precise method to reply to a message and the someone else quotes the whole thing with their reply above, the message goes through another round or two of replies and then gets forwarded on to someone else who was not one of the original recipients. Good luck figuring out the track of the conversation.
{Unclassified}
-----Original Message-----
From: mbravo@spb.ru
Sent: January 22, 2008, 10:39AM
To: Slashdot-all@slashdot.org; phobos13013@corporate-email.com; digg-all@digg.com; bob2074@dobbs.com; bob@aol.com;
Subject: Corporate Email Etiquette - Dead or Alive?
"I work in a largish company, heavily into IT, and in a complex and quickly changing market. Employees are predominantly in the 30 or younger age-bracket, and as you might expect we rely on a lot of internal e-mail. Despite that, lately I'm finding myself increasingly frustrated by a complete lack of e-mail etiquette in the company. A typical thread might look like a hundred-message-long chain of one-line replies, with full quoting and hundreds of recipients in the 'To:' field. It feels like it is happening more and more often. I don't seem to be seeing much success in explaining to my co-workers what the problem is here. How do you deal with this at your place of business, and does your company care? Does the company take any policing or educating measures?"
...and it should be known by now
i don't understand. are we actually concerned, in 2008, about consuming excess disk space and bandwidth because of simple text? sure, it adds up, but unless people are passing around big bulky attachements, i have a hard time believing over-quoted email text is a big corporate burden. it would seem to me worth the resources to have the entire conversation right there on the same page within scrolling distance.
(granted, gmail does it better, but not all of our employers are as enlightened in that regard.)
i could live a little longer in this prison
It depends... the people in the office who only use e-mail to communicate are often the ones I get one-line e-mails with bad grammar and no signatures, etc., from. However, a lot of us use an office-wide Jabber system now, so I increasingly get brief messages or requests over iChat. Unless I'm just really quickly rattling off an e-mail from my iPod or something, I make sure to treat an e-mail much more formally than I suspect many others do. Working in government, it's considered an official gov't document/record, so I tend to treat it more officially than a quick chat message.
-Matthew Riley "TofuMatt" MacPherson
I have a website
try a wiki, a forum, a social-networking solution akin to facebook, IMs or other online chats, extranets, online live documents (like writely/google docs), whatever. email is an outdated medium. try "collaborative software" in ask.com
It sounds like you're using email when you should be using another, or several different technologies.
Look into putting up an IM server, a wiki, blogs, online discussion groups, etc. Email is poorly suited to the kind of long-running threads you're talking about. One size does NOT fit all.
AccountKiller
Gmail is what causes those threads with one line responses because it feels much more like chatting than sending emails. People who don't have the feature to remove the quoted text will always complain. Is it a good or bad thing?
Gmail removes somethings that were an annoyance when I used pine/thunderbird, and now I just press "reply all" most of the times, and don't bother cleaning subject or to:/cc: fields. But the "reply all" feature should reply to everyone in the discussion, not just to the ones that were included in the last email.
Ad-Hoc email lists should be easy to set up..
Everything is in the title and the joke in the body !
"I work in a largish company, heavily into IT, and in a complex and quickly changing market. Employees are predominantly in the 30 or younger age-bracket, and as you might expect we rely on a lot of internal e-mail. Despite that, lately I'm finding myself increasingly frustrated by a complete lack of e-mail etiquette in the company. A typical thread might look like a hundred-message-long chain of one-line replies, with full quoting and hundreds of recipients in the 'To:' field. It feels like it is happening more and more often. I don't seem to be seeing much success in explaining to my co-workers what the problem is here. How do you deal with this at your place of business, and does your company care? Does the company take any policing or educating measures?"
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Not much else going on today? Hey, maybe we could start an email chain on it.
If you have any power in your company, just try to force uninstallation of Outlook.
Outlook 2007 generates large mails, with plenty of RTF parts and weird attachments (especially when you put pictures in your mail).
Oh, and tell them that they won't receive a phone from Nokia or money from Bill Gates if they forward their mail to 100+ people (cf hoaxbuster.com).
The corporate environment I'm in rather encourages this. First of all, you copy as many people as possible to CYA - my direct boss specifically asks to be CC'd on anything I send out of department, others include their bosses on the replies, sometimes adding a couple of VPs if they think there might be a person to blame for something or another, and so it piles up.
Also, it's considered "proper" to top-post and include all prior emails in the chain so that one can easily reference previous points of the conversation without searching through Outlook. I was the only person in my circle of correspondance that trimmed my replies, so I gave up bothering. Someone was bound to get upset at me for it, at some point.
How do you deal with this at your place of business
Beatings and electrocutions. It may work differently outside the gulag, but I wouldn't know.
We're experimenting with other methods. Here's a picture of our recent IT hires. We give them free reign in deciding disciplinary actions.
> "I work in a largish company, heavily into IT, and in a complex and quickly changing market.
> Employees are predominantly in the 30 or younger age-bracket, and as you might expect we
> rely on a lot of internal e-mail. Despite that, lately I'm finding myself increasingly frustrated
> by a complete lack of e-mail etiquette in the company. A typical thread might look like a
> hundred-message-long chain of one-line replies, with full quoting and hundreds of recipients in
> the 'To:' field. It feels like it is happening more and more often. I don't seem to be seeing
> much success in explaining to my co-workers what the problem is here. How do you deal with this
> at your place of business, and does your company care? Does the company take any policing or
> educating measures?"
no.
Thing that annoyed me were emails with no subject - how do you prioritize answering them?
I set up a rule that made a subject mandatory.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
It is mainly for this reason that I consider email a third-class means of communication, even below sticky-notes attached to the desk.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Are you saying there's something wrong with including the original texts in the reply? That feature was intended to give one-line messages context when replies take a while or when someone new is introduced into an ongoing discussion.
Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by moving to where you can't find them.
It sounds like you're using email when you should be using another, or several different technologies.
Yeah, like speech. I hear it's getting pretty advanced now. You can use those new fangled electromagnetophone things.
That's why you include the body of the email in the short listing of your emails.
Sounds like things are sailing along smoothly at this company (or his priorities are in the wrong place) if this is the worst of what this guy has to worry about.
My problem is e-mail conversations, with 20 e-mails going back and forth. Cause I'm a manager, people think they have to include me in on the conversation so I can "stay in the loop".
People, have your conversation, come to some conclusions, and e-mail me a brief summary.
What I mean is it not business related or is it business related. I work for a small company of about 25, and I setup an internal Jabber server to allow people to talk to each other, and create group sessions, without sending on stupid email stuff that doesn't really need to be sent. Keeps them off AOL or Yahoo messenger and talking to others outside the company. But email etiquette really isn't dead, just the one liners are sometimes all that is needed. I ask for something to get approved for purchase and most times I get a "Get it done" reply back. Its just that people don't have anything else to say, or need to say anything else to have their reply mean anything. And the long list of the email being resent is just because people just hit the reply-all button and it includes the whole email thread, which could mean just bad programming and not bad etiquette.
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It sounds like either your co-workers don't know what etiquette is (or don't want to use it). Anyhow, maybe a forum would be the solution. Anything real time like IRC would be very hard to moderate (bots might not do everything you need), but a forum wouldn't.
Plus if you do create a forum, you guys will be able to post rules and whatnot, which could lead to some of employees to follow them and if they don't, well... They should have read 'em.
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Email bloat, what about when someone emails you from MegCorp with a one line reply, but then has a 40 line legal disclaimer underneath (longest one I ever got). If you want to display company policy, give a web link for anyone that gives a damn, stop making the email so damn long.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I have groups set up, where you can only see two things, the sender and the group as to, even if you reply to all, there will be one, or max two mails. If the To user was in the group, he will get only one mail.
... I don't have so much mail-hundreds-long-threads anymore as I had in one of my older companies.
If I get mails inside those "one line above, full quote bottom", I just cut everything below the quote, and reply in the good old style. At least I put a "break" into such threads.
But actually, most quick things get decided via Jabber (in house server) anyway
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
It's funny because I find voice mail extremly unhelpfull. An email is so much better because it's very easy to gloss over, but an voicemail requires your whole attention and you still need to write it down if you are going to send it to someone else.
;-)
Or perhaps you have an easy way of doing forward with voicemail, would be fun..
Sounds like you're knocking on IM's door. People have recommended a few solutions here like Jabber, Skype, etc. All can help to keep the email trails clean. It is also quite convenient to have company wide IM.
If you're not tied to any sort of email provider or system currently, Google Apps (gmail for your domain) could be a good solution. I implemented it at my last shop (40 people, young, technology oriented company), and it proved fairly useful.
Beyond that, no technology will ever replace good, thoughtful policies regarding email communication. There's always something to be said about implementing company wide policies regarding proper communication (i.e. no reply-to-all one liners like "sound good"). You'll always have a group of people who communicate in their own ways, but even making mention of how messy it gets starts to remind people to be a little more thoughtful of what they send. Often, the act of merely mentioning 'more thoughtful communication' is a big start.
Also, depending on your needs, perhaps some sort of Wiki / Sharepoint collaboration system might be what's needed. I implemented a Sharepoint / Intranet solution for a client and email communication went way down, simply from people having a common internal intranet solution for company communication.
There's no one magical bullet, but there are definitely some proven techniques to keep things clean.
What exactly is the problem? The fact that co-workers are writing large emails or the fact that they aren't using CC and BCC fields? Because honestly, those are more personal preferences than "de-facto" rules in regards to email. Email is great for topics that are too large or complex to be discussed over the phone in a reasonable amount of time. In that case, emails can justly become rather large.
And too many contacts in the "to" field? Really? I think your nit-picking might be the real problem here.
Now, the real issue with emails today is that kids out of college cannot spell for their life and they have no sense of how to conduct themselves in a business situation. In the extent that that extends to their emails, yes it's a problem.
Abortions for some, small American flags for others.
Trimming the top-posting is slightly less important-- people just delete the previous messages to have a nice archive. That is, if someone didn't trim early!
Dear Vellmont,
Bullshit.
Sincerely,
FZ
An email sent to say 20 folks in the morning... half hit "reply" and the other half hit "reply all". By the afternoon my inbox is filled with all types of conversation, etc... on the topic. I then spend/waste my time trying to get everyone back on the same "page". More time is wasted following emails all over the place than actually working on the topic the email originally addressed. Everyone I've spoken to agrees with the frustrations and wasted time, but nothing is done to correct it because one or two big-wigs think that that is the best way for them to be kept informed of what is going on. (?) My only solution thus far is to call actual person-to-person meetings, make actual office visits, etc... This is increasingly becoming more efficient as To/CC box address lists become even larger. Maybe I should just send all my emails as "global". :)
- Don't forget to USE ALL CAPS because this is a serious issue.
- Definitely use IM speak such as "u hv 2 do ths!"
- Don't forget to advertise everywhere so you get some coin out of this effort.
- Use lots of non-words and jibberish so it gets through the spam filters.
Good Luck with that!(You just know those guys in accounting need bigger dicks anyways!)
test it on your account first to make sure.
Gmail isn't much help if you want to keep your firm's internal email off other peoples' servers.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The company I work for deals directly with customers a lot. At least 1 person has been fired for their inability (I assume it was not unwillingness, after all the talks and customer complaints over a -year-) to communicate properly via email.
Intra-office communication is a little more lax, but the basic etiquette rules are always followed.
The problem is not the employees but the employers. If they don't want proper etiquette, there's nothing you can do about it. If they do, they have been very lax and may just not see the problem any more. In the end, it's in their hands, not yours.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
We have enough trouble getting everyone to use subject lines, let alone quote properly
It never seems to be a problem for anyone since they know I'm prepared to take the problem seriously and do my best to fix it, plus I can ask the questions I need to, get answers quickly and make notes.
Email is useful to highlight an initial problem and who knows anything about that problem, but when there needs to be a lot more wordage, nothing is quicker than the telephone and people talking.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Email etiquette is dead. Has been for years. Some things I've noticed which contributed to its decline:
There is probably more but I can't think of them right now. The main problem is that no-one is taught any etiquette and (as they've never used UNIX or posted in news forums) they haven't had any kind of etiquette forced on them by an application or verbally beaten into them by some irate news group member.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
The reason that people in corporations top post is because Outlook pretty much forces you to top post. Since so many companies use it, it has become the "norm".
Getting companies to handle sane quoting is going to take a big change from Microsoft and a big cultural shift. I don't expect it any time soon. The habits are far too ingrained at this point.
(And, yes, I know where are plug-ins/hacks for Outlook that reformat e-mail. I have yet to get any of them to work. They seem to be based on a loophole that was plugged in later versions of Outlook. I have yet to find anyone who has gotten them to work.)
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Hey, are you referring to the Oracle 11i system status message and ensuing reply-all storm last week?
... particularly the hundreds of "please remove me from this list" messages sent via reply-all.
I thought that was hilarious
Seriously, if that many people are responding to it, then anything you (or the respondents) add will simply be lost in the noise. The only reason to send an email to that many people is if you:
a) have some information to dissemminate
b) don't have an effective heirarchy
In either case there's no point responding.
People (well, inexperienced emailers - and it sounds like your company has it's fair share) often feel the need to respond to something they receive. Apart from giving the illusion of working, when all they're doing is getting in the way, it gives an opportunity to impress other equally idle people with their wit and insight.
Hopefully your personnel dept. are monitoring these emails and using them as the basis for the list of people who contribute nothing to the company - while the rest of you are quietly getting on with your work.
Sadly, it's probably the HR people who generate a lot of this garbage, and measure a person's worth by the volume of stuff they produce, not it's quality.
Just in case, maybe you should write an email responder that adds a few random comments of your own to each of these, and forwards it to everyone else.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Outlook QuoteFix. Quote sensibly, and the rest falls into place. You learn to appreciate the value of replying in context, and trimming out unnecessary stuff.
OTOH, I have been chastened by managers who told me "What's wrong with your emails???" *sigh*
Constitutionally Correct
A friend of mine teaches BI and AP English at the local High school. She has a plan to talk to businesses about teaching the employees how to effectively communicate through email and other written forms, in a manner that will make them sound professional to clients and such. I think hiring a teacher part time (during the summer you might find a ton of them willing to earn a few extra bucks) might be the way you would want to go, as they are use to teaching, and are cheaper then the professional guys.
And no, she hasn't tried to test this on me, which is why my writing still sucks.
There are a few options that have worked well in my company.
1) The IT department needs to educate the employees on proper usage of email. This includes email etiquette as well as any policies that the company regarding email usage.
2) The company that I work for is pretty laid back. Our IT department will create special mailing lists for us to use for off-topic discussion. For example, if there are a lot of people that like to discuss sports, they will create a special 'Sports' mailing list that can be used for that type of discussion. This has proven to be an extremely effective method of keeping regular emails on-topic, and since it is an email list, you can set up filters in your mail program to keep those emails out of your Inbox (assuming you opted to to be added to that special off-topic mailing list).
3) There are classes out there specifically about email etiquette. You may want to research local ones that can do onsite training and provide your manager or HR department with that information. Try to find someone that will cover grammar and punctuation. You would be surprised at how much you can gain from this training.
> > "I work in a largish company, heavily into IT, and in a complex and quickly changing market.
> > Employees are predominantly in the 30 or younger age-bracket, and as you might expect we
> > rely on a lot of internal e-mail. Despite that, lately I'm finding myself increasingly frustrated
> > by a complete lack of e-mail etiquette in the company. A typical thread might look like a
> > hundred-message-long chain of one-line replies, with full quoting and hundreds of recipients in
> > the 'To:' field. It feels like it is happening more and more often. I don't seem to be seeing
> > much success in explaining to my co-workers what the problem is here. How do you deal with this
> > at your place of business, and does your company care? Does the company take any policing or
> > educating measures?"
>
> no.
me too
Chat is an often overlooked business tool. I work in a setting where we have people all over the world. If we need something, we fire up a quick VTC (iChat or on Nokia N800/N810) and chat. More than one person need to be involved? No problem...chat (note: the N8xx cannot do concurrent multi-user VTC). People need to stop using e-mail like it's a damned high-latency chat system.
I took me a while to figure out what CYA meant.
I thought it was a Canadian acronym for "See Why, Eh?"
English is not this
Consider an average prole on (say) $30/hour. If they get 10 of these dumb emails a day, each of 200 lines it will take a few minutes to read each one. Call it about 30 minutes per day or $15. If just one person responds to each of the 100 people on the email, that takes each of those 100 people another 1 minutes to read the new stuff = 100 minutes = $50 per responder, per email.
If 10 people respond to 10 emails a day (all sent to 100 people), that's $5k/day of wasted people time
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Perhaps it has something to do with our IT staff generally being older and more used to e-mail than IM. Or perhaps it's because we hate looking in our e-mail, because we get too much anyway.
Anyway, we rarely have lots of people in the TO: line. We have mailing lists creating, so you send to a single address and it reaches everyone on it. Now, sometimes this hits everyone because we don't have a functional intranet, and so HR posts all internal job posts to the whole company by e-mail. But mailing lists are rarely used except for a wide announcement.
If someone decides to a wide mailing list, well, that tends to result in a fair amount of ridicule for that person. New employees do it occasionally, but that usually only happens once then.
If you want to have a discussion, we either get on the phone or have a meeting.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
In other words, "Outlook style" is the problem. Outlook QuoteFix is the solution.
Constitutionally Correct
If "Email Etiquette" is your biggest complaint with your users, consider yourself lucky.
Preview panes mean that the most relevant/recent information is at the TOP of the email, where it can be seen immediately.
Quoting of previous messages puts the information in reverse chronological order, which makes sense.
Email going to mobile devices tend to download the first 5 KB and allow the user to download the rest if necessary, if all email was bottom posted, every single email would need to be fully downloaded to read the new comments. Top posting means that the relevant information is most likely to be present in the 5KB Preview, and additional time and data charges are unnecessary.
Don't top post. Email should be like driving a car/owning a gun -- you need to take a class first.
I think you need a girlfriend (or boyfriend).
Install more disk space, and stop your whining.
-----Original Message-----
From: mbravo@spb.ru
Sent: January 22, 2008, 10:39AM
Small wonder that SPAM remains a problem when the world's most popular email client uses an attribution format that includes the full email address of the sender. All a spammer has to do is visit any public repository of email messages and harvest away.
I'm a fan of partial quoting for personal emails, but for corporate email exchanges I've been won over by full quoting. It provides an easy history of the conversation in case new people need to be brought in or I forget what was said a week ago.
What I don't like is the way email (and PowerPoint) is becoming a substitute for documentation. Many times I've asked for information on how something works and been sent an old email or presentation. PowerPoint in particular is terrible for this because most slide shows by nature need to be explained.
Visit the
Effect what you can, don't worry about the rest. When you respond, trim the distribution, quote inline, remove unnecessary quoting, etc. But be careful not to remove too much of what may be pertinent information when cropping. Also beware that some users won't understand that your answers to questions are inline, as they are conditioned to top-posting, so when I do this I just start with "Answers inline".
Its not that big a deal. There are bigger problems than how many previous emails have been quoted in a response. Get a life and get over it.
Its really quite simple. Install a good, robust, XMPP/Jabber server and chat away. Chat has allowed my company to get on a three week release cycle, nicknamed the release train. Productivity is through the rough and it even extends work to home easily.
one way i figure to stop one liner emails, and maybe better com between people is to step up a Jabber system, that way they could just IM one another (and spy on them)
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
In my experience, it's dead. My office has a bit of an informal tone, but I get emails from external businesses we deal with that have spelling mistakes, IM speak ("... if UR able 2..."), and other things.
We've received emails that are clearly accusatory that we've failed at something, or something is our fault. We've had people fly off the handle when we reply that that's not the case with evidence attached (my favorite: when it's a quote from one of their earlier emails).
Things just still surprise me. Yesterday I got an email from one of the highest ranking people in our sales/marketing department. It was all very business and sort of what I'd expect, until the second to last line which was... "kthxbye".
People (both internal and external) are often far less proper and "businessey" (I hate to use that fake word, but I don't know what else to use) than I would expect. The etiquette is gone (not that it was probably ever there).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The solution is to stop getting frustrated about it.
Also, most corporate broadcast mail is sent anonymously from a send-only email address. If there is an error, ambiguity or other problem with the mail, who do you contact?
As a corporate best-practice, may I suggest that every email broadcast to the company should be signed by someone. If it's important enough to send to thousands of people, it's important enough for someone to sign it. I understand that this type of mail is sent from a send-only address, because you don't want zillions of replies, or worse, reply-alls. However, there should be some way for a recipient to contact the sender.
One-way communication is poor communication. Employees respond more favorably to messages that are from a fellow employee, rather than from an anonymous corporate server.
Computers obey me.
I can't stand the email replies that are "See inline" and then you've got a whole conversation that is embedded in the previous one.
After 2 of these, I have no idea who made what comments on the original questions. Most people don't have Outlook insert anything other than ">>" for their comments.
I'd be happy if people just learned to write their reply BELOW my message, so I could see what they were responding to.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Also i hate those childish and early-90ties-ugly icons that Notes allows to be put into the top of the mails.
Added to which, when you get too many emails you don't read them all which then means that occasionally you miss on.
Just looking at my emails received for today from midnight (GMT).
Received 112, read 35, replied to 12.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
Something that's come from the top in our company is for email to become even more formal, much like a written letter. Most emails include a "Dear Joe," clause at the top, and a "sincerely," or similar at the bottom.
Having the formal opening does help to enforce a single person in the "To:" clause, which several CC's, which is the way it's suppose to be. We still have Outlook, so it's full top-quoting, it does work to show the sequence of letters. They're still quickly written letters, but the formalness does help with the triviality.
Sincerely,
Lance
99% of my work e-mail is to or from a customer. Top-posting, full-quoting, and non-plaintext are the order of the day. Obviously, we have nothing to gain and everything to lose by yapping at them about it, so we simply follow suit. The extra cost of bandwidth and storage is peanuts compared to the cost of Getting Useful Things Done for them.
Anyone figured out what the 'carbon footprint' of one sent (or recieved) email is, per recipient?
Vescere bracis meis.
Dude, what we have here is a business opportunity. You need to organize corporate seminars in email effectiveness. Spend a day putting together inane power point slides pointing out the obvious in bulleted lists, and they'll pay you money to rant at them -- I mean, gently criticize with humble, humorous anecdotes -- their stupid email habits.
If it comes packaged as a corporate training session, then it's got to be good.
No one listens to some computer geek jabbering in email, I mean come on.
Here is how to handle e-mail in a corporate environment effectively:
http://www.manager-tools.com/2005/09/got-email/
The reason is simple. On Usenet people somewhat could ignore those who did not follow the rules. Often the people with knowledge were also the people who liked the netiquette.
In a company you seldom can ignore people and very often you can not even correct them. Try explaining a CEO that he is doing something wrong. Try ignoring him. Try to put presure on him.
That together with software that completely ignores how things are done by default and you have the mess we are in now.
Then there is the legal department who want to add a 47 line message about the email that is completely st00pid. 'IF the email is not for you' Well, it ended up in my mailbox, so that means that it was inteded for me.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Outlook with its DEFAULT mode of top posting killed anything resembling email etiquette many years ago.
It is pretty much a waste of effort to try and "educate" anyone why top posting is so bad.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
And like a few other people point out, full quoting is just another method to cover your own ass when the shit hits the fan.
Why isn't there a transparent, multi-message view which can limit itself to just threads, and when showing those show only the date, sender, subject line (if modified) and the _new_ portions of the message?
For extra points, it should allow one to directly reply in a bottom pane and should limit replies contextually to only people whose reponses are being addressed by default.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
specifically requires logs of your IM server to be maintained?
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
Unfortunate but true.
First, forget about changing the people, it's futile to try. You need to find a solution that works for you under the current situation.
Second, never ever put something in writing what you wouldn't want to have to explain at court. There's no reason for it. Be offensive as you like face to face, in meeting or on the phone, but always the voice of reason in mails or chat. Never take part of bad-mouthing people in written, you simply don't know who will read it.
About mails where you're on the CC: list: ignore anything where you're only on CC. If the sender would have intended it for you, he'd put you on the To: list.
For mails where you're on the To: list, the question is if you're the only one. If there are other people on it and things need to be done based on it, assume someone else from the To: list will do the work and ignore it. If it the sender intended something specially for you, he'd should have sent you the mail addressed only to you.
Mail containing meeting minutes of meetings you didn't attend, ignore them. I something relevant to you was discussed there, you'd either have been invited or someone would have had the task to inform you about it. Wading through other peoples meeting minutes isn't productive.
All this sounds harsh and should only apply to mails you don't care about, but in reality works quite well. For the CC: I always liked to blame it on my clever spam filter that failed to highlight it as non-spam because I'm not a recipient. People get very miffed about that but somehow seem to slow to come up with good arguments against it. For the other mails you ignored, it's best to ramp that up slowly starting by the most stupid ones. The more mails you ignore, the less people expect you to read them.
If some mail asks for work to be done and you're on the To: list and you don't feel safe enough to ignore it completely, in big organisations a good way to cover your arse is to ask the original sender for a meeting of all people on the To: list to schedule resource allocations. If you are creative, add to that mail a few additional people, best some with opposing agendas. That usually puts off tasks for long enough for them to become irrelevant.
About the endless quotes and attachments, what works best is never to quote the whole thing. Always remove all quotes except a very few you are replying to. That has the advantage, that people see only what you want them to see. Most people won't find the original message in their inbox anyway. It's also a good idea to cut down on the recipient list (just leave enough to cover your backside). That divides te recipient crowd into groups with different information, which always can be useful, in case people start to blame you. Then you can fob it off to someone else you informed but who didn't act on it.
Also avoid short mails, except if they're very positive to you. Present the case with advantages and caveats. Instead of quotes, start your mail with a short - and naturally also biased in your favour - summary of the matter at hand. That forces people to read and think your mail, instead of scanning just for know thread patterns. Most likely, this will exceed most people's attention span. The additional advantage of restating all the important aspects of matter is, that people will sometimes go into discussions about that or will feel uncomfortable to disagree. I always liked to bring up matters like involving the legal department, safety and health regulations, compliances of any kind, or of everything else fails the involvement of the quality control department for affairs I wanted to get rid off. You'd be surprised how few people dare to put in writing, that they don't want to make sure those things are done properly.
This should give you in the middle term some lee-way to ignore mails as you see fit, and people will get very cautious of asking for your help. And, as a side benefits, you sometimes are able to collect mails that are always very popular if your company happens to be investigated for some misdeeds.
Cheers.
Get a plan together and send it to management telling them how these messages are pointless and wasting everyones time, then IT will adopt some new rules for all email clients.
- truncate all 'original messages' when replying to so many bytes
- remove the Reply to All button and bury it in the menu
- disable Include Original Message by default
I just reply all asking everyone to stop using the "reply all" feature.
after a few more reply alls agreeing with me, the thread usually dies.
I can handle the horribly formatted replies, even the stupid animated smilies and constantly incrementing "do you really need to print this" or "this email is confidential" appended sigs but what gets my goat is being cc'd on emails that have nothing to do with me, having to endure the mind numbing back and forth and THEN having to deal with the 15+ "THANKS!", "You're the best", "I owe you one" and subsequent "No problem", "NP" replies - that's what drives me insane. It also seems that the vast majority of the offenders are from the same managers that page you so you can't even filter them out of you blackberry so you always have to look when the damn thing goes off.
I've given up trying to educate people on email, it's easier to just figure it out and in the end the CYA aspect has paid off for me on several occasions as it seems I work Alzheimer's patients.
1) No attachments allowed
2) Plain text only email
3) 5k email size limit
4) Pay cut to anyone who top posts
Yeah we old timers don't use email anymore in the workplace for important things... because it must be the emails making everything harder to accomplish.
No, we'll just drop by your desk some random time for a mission-critical task while you are out to lunch... and then hire someone else who doesn't need to eat or go to the bathroom so much.
YES, Corporate Email Etiquette is still important... even more so now that all the good project managers got the boot.
Also remember, that in wartime recession, the worst and best run companies will be the last to go.
A. No.
Q. Does top-posting make sense?
Neither should you bottom post. The only sane method of replying is interleaved posting where each segment is prefaced by the questions it's answering.
The equally-bad alternatives of top- and bottom-posting demand that the reader pay complete attention to your reply and the message before it so that they can follow the context of every statement you make. This is sociopathic. Don't do it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
A simple Microsoft GPO can take care of users including original text when replying in outlook.
If you've ever worked in a big corporation you know the golden rule: CYA (Cover Your Ass). That is accomplished by Reply-To-All so that EVERYONE is in the loop and NOONE will complain that they were left out of the picture, wasn't kept informed, etc., etc. Yeah, it's a sign of micromanaging. Welcome to my corporate hell.
Yeah, I do "interleaved posting". You wouldn't believe the number of complaints I get about it. Apparently people are too used to the wrong way of doing this.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
[insert free ipod/myminicity link here]
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Sorry but it is the most annoying thing in the world when people don't include the conversation in the mail. That means I have to gum the works with old emails and reference back to them in order to give your comments context.
Perhaps leaving the quoted text in hurt in the world of dialup and bbs but it helps more than it hurts now. Really, I have too much going on and your conversation really isn't that important to me. I delete your previous mails a month ago, I neither remember what I said or you said. For the love of god, include ALL the quoted text.
The only exception is those stupid chain mails. Those are the definition of bad etiquette.
i work for a very large company, and our adoption of instant messaging (MS Communicator) made a real impact in this kind of email traffic. it also provides a great CYA as we can email ourselves transcripts of the chat. woot! once you implement, users can help by refusing to engage in email chat. i will IM the person if it looks like the email conversation is going to go that route. helps to be proactive...
I work in a mid-sized company in the IT dept. Pretty much every outside of top management follows fairly good email etiquette. For some reason the top brass like to use large, bold, colored fonts and/or all caps when sending out emails. Additionally, they all seem to use the reply function as an address book so all the emails we get from them have unrelated subject lines.
Originally I thought it was an age thing, but the 60'ish office manager here (CA) doesn't do that - just the top brass in NY. I think it's a power thing, or maybe all the big wigs they deal with on a regular biases do it. Maybe I should do it too, and get a big promotion!
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
{Private}
-----Original Message-----
From: phobos13013@corporate-email.com
Sent: January 22, 2008, 10:39AM
To: Slashdot-all@slashdot.org; phobos13013@corporate-email.com; digg-all@digg.com; bob2074@dobbs.com; bob@aol.com;
Subject: Re: Corporate Email Etiquette - Dead or Alive?
no
{Unclassified}
-----Original Message-----
From: mbravo@spb.ru
Sent: January 22, 2008, 10:39AM
To: Slashdot-all@slashdot.org; phobos13013@corporate-email.com; digg-all@digg.com; bob2074@dobbs.com; bob@aol.com;
Subject: Corporate Email Etiquette - Dead or Alive?
"I work in a largish company, heavily into IT, and in a complex and quickly changing market. Employees are predominantly in the 30 or younger age-bracket, and as you might expect we rely on a lot of internal e-mail. Despite that, lately I'm finding myself increasingly frustrated by a complete lack of e-mail etiquette in the company. A typical thread might look like a hundred-message-long chain of one-line replies, with full quoting and hundreds of recipients in the 'To:' field. It feels like it is happening more and more often. I don't seem to be seeing much success in explaining to my co-workers what the problem is here. How do you deal with this at your place of business, and does your company care? Does the company take any policing or educating measures?"
and a response is required
CC: response is optional, mostly FYI
BCC: cover your ass
The problem that I run into is web mail, where it's difficult to move email addresses around.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
The way I see it, if management does care it will always be a problem. With the proliferation of e-mail in the home environment, laziness and poor etiquette was inevitable. I told our company owners that it's their company, and their reputation on the line if e-mails with odd backgrounds and goofy footers were sent to customers. They agreed. It's now company policy to write all e-mails in plain text and no fancy formatting what-so-ever. Along with proper greetings, and proper reply structures. E-mail etiquette should be very very similar to business letter etiquette. Would you trust a paper letter from a legitimate business with goofy stuff at the bottom? Policy always works if taking from the top down...
Virtually every email application out there allows you to set responses to top post. Additionally, if you have to mix text which I do on occasion when I want to address specific points is to judiciously cut text and then put your response directly next to the relevant point you're trying to expand on.
A. Top posting makes sense if you don't delete the '>'s. > Q. Does top-posting make sense? Would interleaved no still make sense if it I wouldn't made it not make sense?
I would like to see AOl and others to post some rules about forwarding decade old funnies and pushing for quick checks of snopes. Just because this is new to you does not mean it is new to the hundred people on your list. I had to delist from my own father and now my grandmother is online so I expect a wave of the same old stuff.....
It would be cool if there were a mail server feature that would "fix" when the mail is received for delivery. It could detect when top-posting was used and automatically turn it into bottom posting, and apply other obvious fixes. This wouldn't even be that hard because I think that all email clients precede quoted blocks with ">" at the front of each line, and nested quote blocks can just as easily be detected by multiple ">" prefixes.
I actually made the mistake of sending out a "public service announcement" to the engineering mailing list at my company a couple of years back, detailing the reasons that bottom posting was better than top posting, and how quoted blocks should be trimmed to keep them relevent, etc, and of course a multi-day flamefest between various engineers ensued with no one actually listening to anything that anyone else was saying, just spouting off about their own preferences and why their way was "right". Nobody seemed to care about the links I included which pointed to comprehensive summaries of how email etiquitte works and why. I learned my lesson, and won't do that again.
Stop whining and configure your email client accordingly. You can "explain" things to your co-workers, but (a) it probably won't get through to them, (b) it would only last as long as your turnover rate, and (c) you're going to look like you can't handle his workload (or else the guy who's just complaining for no reason).
Avoid the issue and just handle it on your side. I totally sympathize with your situation (I'm a consultant, so I get it from my people and from the client, and we're not in the same location, which makes the email and uber-CC tendency worse), but just suck it up and find a way to still be productive.
Good luck,
Maybe Thunderbird's Quote Collapse could come in handy. I'm using it and it does a great job. Plus the quotes can always be expanded via a "+" button, taking into account the depth of quoting. As for the number of emails, you could try sender throttling. Limit them to 5 msg/hr. They won't be happy, but that will give you a chance to explain the problems to them. In the end, there's nothing like educating your users (even against their will).
Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers!
With all due respect, I wouldn't worry about your posting style just yet.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
A. Top posting makes sense if you don't delete the '>'s.
> Q. Does top-posting make sense?
Would interleaved no still make sense if it I wouldn't made it not make sense?
That's because people who do it (and further insist on plain text emails) create a mess of text that's impossible to follow. There are masses of angle brackets and no clear demarcation of where one starts and another stops. This is compounded by people who screw up the line breaks, making emails an impossible quagmire to reconstruct (without spending more time working out the structure of the email than it takes to read the damn thing). BBS and UNIX people are the worst about this, because they're militant about their plain text and hardcoded way of doing things.
Guess what? Interleaved posting and plain text email sucks too. It's no better than top quoting at the end of the day.
Proper etiquette here is to restate the question you're answering. Don't quote the entire message in your response at all. Email isn't a forum, and with people who refuse to use email features invented after 1990 (quote boxes, bar indicators, and/or colorizing quoted text), it's most aggravating when someone tries to make it one. Treat email as the written correspondence it is and the problems go away. Even one-line responses work.
If you are not hungry, then you are not on a diet.
Yeah, I am definitely not hungry at the moment. I fell off the "diet bandwagon" into a buffet!
Overall I am still doing well enough. We all deserve a day off now and then, it just can't be 5 days off in a row.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
You would have more luck developing a mind control ray. Instead of trying to manipulate other people, see how you can manage it better. Whether that be ignoring the emails or using filtering. Don't be a little bitch.
preferring a team based arrangement where whoever has the expertise in the topical area is the "boss" of that piece
Sounds like a great arrangement. What do you do when more than one person "has the expertise" in the same area, yet they do not agree on how something is done? Are you then back to an executive style decision?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Bah! cheers, Mad - curmudgeonly netizen since 1995
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
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-----Original Message-----
From: phobos13013
Sent: January 22, 2008, 10:48AM
To: Slashdot-all@slashdot.org; phobos13013@corporate-email.com; digg-all@digg.com; bob2074@dobbs.com; bob@aol.com;
Subject: Re: Corporate Email Etiquette - Dead or Alive? no
{Unclassified}
-----Original Message-----
From: mbravo@spb.ru
Sent: January 22, 2008, 10:39AM
To: Slashdot-all@slashdot.org; phobos13013@corporate-email.com; digg-all@digg.com; bob2074@dobbs.com; bob@aol.com;
Subject: Corporate Email Etiquette - Dead or Alive? "I work in a largish company, heavily into IT, and in a complex and quickly changing market. Employees are predominantly in the 30 or younger age-bracket, and as you might expect we rely on a lot of internal e-mail. Despite that, lately I'm finding myself increasingly frustrated by a complete lack of e-mail etiquette in the company. A typical thread might look like a hundred-message-long chain of one-line replies, with full quoting and hundreds of recipients in the 'To:' field. It feels like it is happening more and more often. I don't seem to be seeing much success in explaining to my co-workers what the problem is here. How do you deal with this at your place of business, and does your company care? Does the company take any policing or educating measures?"
:0 * ^X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook /dev/null
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
unsubscribe
Really, there's nothing you can do about it. Better just cope with it.
That's really old-school, like inkwell-and-parchment style oldschool, when you freak out just because you see a cascade, even if it is between everyone on the network. This is the 90's, it's not like text-storage is an issue, any more.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
The automatic exclusion of quoted text when you read a discussion thread where people just include the old messages for references. But still showing vital parts of quoted text if the email uses the quoted text in line and comments on specific parts. Gmail almost always get it right, and all you have to do is press r write what you want to say and send it.
Editing and removing of old reference text is not needed anymore, because gmail has the feature of hiding quoted text to show you what is important. What I'm saying is that when you have a wonderfull feature that just work, you just wont care about what that means to other people.
I used to work for a large telco and email was the corporate political tool dejour for your cow-orkers to make your life a living hell. If it was addressed to me and I couldn't make sense out of what they wanted I would respond to the sender and ask them what they wanted. And since they could NEVER properly describe their needs in email form, it usually took a phone call. The burden is upon them because they want something from you. And once you get them to spell it out for you, they tend to goof and expose their true intentions: 1) to do their job, 2) get you to break policy for a back door request or 3) to make someone look bad.
I know I am in the minority here, but I like Top Posting. Here are the reasons why.
1. Emails are not books. I don't need to read the beginning, middle and end to understand the plot. Normal emails (as apposed to the office politics stuff) do not have a plot. Books are read top to bottom and front to back. Again, email is not a book.
2. The most recent and most relevant info is at the top. If I don't care about the beginning, I don't have to re-read or scroll down to get past the stuff I already know.
3. Yes, if you are added to a conversation after the emails have gone back and forth, top posting makes you start at the bottom and work up. What you are really saying is that your comfort and ease of reading is more important than all the other people who only needed to read the reply since they already remembered the rest of the email.
4. Email is no longer the same as USENET. If you are on an email discussion list, USENET rules still make sense. I can read the last email, top to bottom without having to wade through the other emails. But most emails are not discussion lists. Trying to force all emails to conform to USENET rules is like trying to make all cars use a shifter on the floor board because it made the most sense for early cars. It still makes sense for some cars, but please don't try to force it for everyone.
5. Inline posting makes sense only when replying to portions of emails such as lists of questions. And only when there are a limited number of back and forth conversations. I really, really hate trying to figure out who actually replied to a question, and did they reply before or after Joe's comment that changed the perspective of the original email. And I have seen a couple of times where someone did an inline reply to each and every sentence. It wasn't readable.
Again, just so I am clear, this is just my opinion. Top Posting makes sense for discussion lists, but not for normal emails. Maybe I am lazy. Maybe I am a slob. But I don't always have the luxury of time to correct and bottom post each an every email I reply to. That time is, IMHO, better spent doing other tasks.
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
We had this problem at work until we got people to use Softros Lan Manager. We pushed it to all the clients, and amazingly they stopped using e-mail for 1 line replies and quick conversations.
Do you often see e-mails as long as this comment thread with just as many different authors? I get things like this all the time.
Normally at the top it says "FYI".
They seem to think it means "For your information", but I know it really means "F**king-up your day, idiot"
I have related issues at work, both with employees and outside customers.
... sometimes, there's just no fighting the collective stupididy of users when it comes to things like e-mail. E-mail to them is and will remain the way to send files around. Problems can be attributed not to using the wrong tool for the job, but to our mail system being slow and unreliable. Similarly, the fact that they get spam in their inboxes sometimes is a failure of the mail system ( because computers can read and have human judgement, right? ) despite the fact that over 99.8% of delivery attempts are already blocked as spam and the fact that we have to be conservative to avoid dropping legit messages.
Rather than thread trimming (which I consider a lost cause for normal users) the main issue I have is people using e-mail as a file transfer system even for huge and/or urgent files. Think: "I don't know any other way to send files, and why shouldn't e-mail be as good as anything else for sending 100MB files around? Plus, when I get the file from the customer I can just hit "forward" to send it to someone else in the organization. And they can forward it in turn. Sure, those two forwards alone add more than 500MB of data to the mail backups and long-term archives, but why should I care about that? If I'm waiting for an urgent file the customer swears they've sent I'll just come and ask IT to get it for me, they can always do that right?"
Argh. Combine deadlines for getting files with customers on cheap ISPs with overloaded, glacial mail servers and a variety of interesting file size limits and you're in for plenty of fun. Storage and backup management isn't nice either, as I have to yell at the users to get them to delete the forwarded crap from their inbox and sent box. Management rejects all suggestions of mail quotas or timed message expiry even after it's explained that the quota or expiry timer can be specific to the in/sent boxes. E-mail file size limits plus bounce messages that explain how to send files using FTP or web upload are similarly vetoed by management. "management" has a 15GB inbox with 20,000 messages, and uses the desktop as the sole document storage location ( finding things by position, not file name ).
Rather than tell the customer to use our established FTP and web file upload facilities (which are trivial to use on all modern OSes - bascially just "click on this link then drag the file to the window that pops up") the staff tend to ask the customer to come in with a CD or USB key for urgent files. They are aware of, and have used, the FTP and web file upload facilities.
So
If the staff aren't interested in learning how to use their computers better or how to avoid problems they're having by changing their behaviour, and if they have a strong preconceived view of how things should work, you're probably not going to get anywhere without management buy-in to provide reasons for them to care. You're not going to get them to trim quoted messages, use sensible sized signatures, provide an explanation along with a forwarded message, stop using a stupid disclaimer, or any of the other basic e-mail ettiquette issues if they don't care about it. If explaining how that makes them easier to communicate with and makes everybody else's life easier doesn't help, you're going to need help from somebody who they'll listen to, such as a supervisor or company management.
Good luck with that. I'll bet management are the worst offenders.
You work at AOL, don't you?
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Here are my pieces of eight that will mark you as a smart user of tool that comes with equal parts utility and trouble.
.pdf: please use settings that reduce the file size
Every professional environment has its own approach towards email. The one I
work in is incredibly reliant on email; so much so that I now call the two or
more hours a day --time that once could have been spent developing people or
advancing mission-- "the tyranny of the inbox". I've been working on my own
rules of email for a while. The top draft candidates follow:
* Is this email necessary? If the recipient sits within visual range and the
transaction can be accomplished with a face to face transaction: consider that
method instead. If you can't see the intended recipient: do they have a
telephone, and can it substitute for the email you are about to send?
* Is this attachment necessary? My tyrannical system administrators turn off my ability to send mail when exceeds 100 MB. The attachment you just
sent with large images may force me to stop work and create new personal
folders to get out of the penalty box. Similarly, if you're going to scan a
document and send me a
instead of bloating it. Got shared network space, a wiki or web space? Send
me the link instead. I have enough files already.
* What's the *real* subject? Please don't send email with cryptic subject
lines: "Question" is among my favorite. Tell me what your question is about!
* (For communications from non-organizational machines or accounts): Please get an email address (from your Internet provider, Yahoo, or Google) that tells me who you
are. "golfnut10@aol.com: or "zepplinfan@hotmail.com" doesn't do this. Save
those addresses for your friends and family. For professional communications:
please use your name in the address.
* When you send me an email: don't assume I'm sitting at my computer staring
at my incoming mail queue all day long. I might be in a meeting. I might be
writing something that's *not* email (I turn off my email client when I do
this). I might be talking with a coworker or walking around to find out what
the newest challenges this day has brought to the 32 employees I'm responsible
for. Even if it's really "Urgent" and even if it really is "Response
required", please don't assume I'm reading it in the minute after you send it.
Email is for time-shifted, asynchronous communication. If it's really urgent:
call me.
* Format your email as plain text please. HTML and Outlook rich text fonts
don't necessarily render faithfully in non-Windows, non-Outlook email tools.
Don't assume everybody is using one.
* Got sensitive, personnel-privileged content in your email? Remember: in my government workplaces it's all subject to Privacy Act and Equal Opportunity queries. I'm happy to place my electronic communications up for scrutiny; be sure that you are too.
* Most modern email tools have excellent rules-based filtering. I may well
have one set up for you; consider doing the same for me.
I just mark their emails as spam. Eventually the inane email goes away. If they have anything important to say, they will eventually seek you out face-to-face to inquire why you didn't act on it. Explain that you didn't see their email, then act surprised when you find it in the bulk folder. "Hmmm, I guess the email filter thought you were a spammer because of all the inane comments you make".
If you really want to be rude, bounce all their messages back with a "spam detected" message.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Emails written in Comic Sans.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
My rule in the office is Only The Decision Maker Will Appear In The "TO:"
The sender will "CC:" themself, and all other recipients will be in the "BCC:"
Learning and exercising proper e-mail etiquette is expensive and ultimately futile because companies are always getting new people that haven't learned the rules yet. In addition, quite a lot of corporate policies are enforced only because people tend to get off on putting the smack down on people that don't know or refuse to obey The Rules, regardless of whether or not the rules exist for a good reason or whether it's the most cost-effective approach. So I'm automatically suspicious of many "e-mail etiquette" rules. In my experience, people aren't annoyed at the 500 lines of quoting, they're "annoyed" that someone dared break the institution's posted rules, and enjoy punishing them.
My advice? Shut up and deal with it. E-mail tools like Gmail automatically hide quoted text, so all of those one-line replies appear as one-line replies, regardless of what got quoted. Compare "wasted" storage costs against the personnel costs of (a) learning these company-specific rules; (b) complying with those rules; and (c) having lots of meetings and e-mail reminders and Slashdot submissions seeking better ways of doing (a) and (b).
If someone's actually wasting everyone's time, and doesn't realize it, tell them. If they keep doing it, compare the costs they're incurring versus the benefit they're providing and fire them if it's appropriate. Otherwise everyone has better things to do with their time.
That is because we know how to use email and the newbies don't :)
Angle brackets should be banished from the face of the earth. Get with the program. 20 year old norms no longer apply in this field. It's out, just like phone line etiquette and dialup Internet access.
They confuse, are a true pain to copy/paste, and are wholly unnecessary. Slashdot has threaded responses and quote styling. At the very least, email should, too.
Etiquette in general has, over the past hundred years, decayed continually. And it's spead up in the last few decades. And when you talk about etiquette in email, where you're not face-to-face with someone, it's going to be much worse. Yes, it's dead. And it will continue to rot.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
>Angle brackets should be banished from the face of the earth. Get w
>ith the program. 20 year old norms no longer apply in this field. It's o
>ut, just like phone line etiquette and dialup Internet access.
>
>They confuse, are a true pain to copy/paste, and are wholly unneces
>sary. Slashdot has threaded responses and quote styling. At the very
> least, email should, too.
WTF are you talking about?
*Normal* mail programs like thunderbird have these "weird" functions called Edit => Rewrap and Edit => Paste As Quotation. These tend to fix up the problems with "angle brackets".
The worst email are the ones where you ask a question, like,
Hi,
blah this problem. OK blah. Can we use blah? Yes
- Bob
BTW, the blah is from original email and there are 2 responses there. Now figure it out. These are the worst emails I get. Others are replies to 6 year old threads to start new ones. I stopped sorting by thread - completely useless.
Finally, text mails are the only real way to transmit mails if you are any serious about spam filtering. If you look at the message source, text-only messages are clean and beautifully formatted. For examples, see something like Debian or BSD mailing lists (some bad examples there too). For the worst mailing lists, see wix-users mailing lists - many posters are @ microsoft.com. Email etiquette cesspool on that list.
I would prefer not to live in a top posting world. However, one thing that's worse than top posting is an email thread in which different people are using different quoting conventions. That gives you a conversation that's near impossible to follow.
Most people these days top post, so I follow suit. Sure, a bunch of netiquette guides written in the early 1990s rail against it, and with sound reasoning, but the vast majority of email users these days would not agree. And etiquette is, by definition, dictated by the majority.
Is it annoying that people use stationery and weird fonts? Maybe. That's a problem with you though, unless there is an office policy to the contrary. Making more work for everyone else is just as obnoxious as the Comic Sans crowd.
Write it like a letter. Don't quote the entire previous message. That is our email policy. Amazingly, the problems are gone. Short emails are clear: "Yes, we can do that." Long emails are focused and professional, organized as memoranda. There is no formatting to worry about, no line break mess, no pile of useless angle brackets, and no tangles of text from multiple individuals.
They think it is a dinosaur. They text on their phones, leave messages on eachothers myspace page (in the public comments section), or any one of a dozen other cheap, impersonal messaging mediums. They may 'shout' at eachother on their mobiles, but they certainly don't actually know anyone's phone number. Many have had little experience using e-mail and don't actually ever care to. They'd sooner send a telegram.
I wonder how many teenagers today have never written a letter and put it in the USPS mail. Think about it. Why would they?
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
In case you missed the reference.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Fucking delivery receipts!
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
At one of the big 3 IT companies:
To: X
Importance: High
Guys,
I don't know how much more of this I can take.
The Norwegian laptop I use has finally packed up, I'm using the old P233 behind Abdulla, which I suppose is quicker than using a typewriter.
The Gui for will not be complete. Some limitations became apparent after I completed the location database this morning, 300Kb is too big for the routines I wrote, so a rewrite to some of the code is required to handle a new format.
Harry,
Network Node Manager cannot give us the output natively. Also, we cannot read the database Openview uses. The customer must creat an export for us. The pains of suddenly appeared in my mind.
Regards,
Employee X
Email, in a corporate environment, is a CYA measure. Standard procedure is:
1) Reply All to anything. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If a person wants to notify everyone from GOD (spelled CEO) down that your project is the cause of the delay, replying to that one person to point out they are the one withholding critical materials is useless. They all need to know that weasel is the problem, not your team.
2) Trimming any message before sending (to everyone, see above) allows the originator to argue that wasn't what they really said, throwing doubt on your reply. So a 1 sentance reply may be at the top of a 2000 word original.
3) Nothing is deleted. Ever. However, the higher up in the chain you are, the more likely you are to view the deleted bin as a storage area. You Exchange admins are painfully aware of this little gem of corporate life.
4) Every conversation is done via email. If you go to a meeting, the meeting will be transcribed and emailed to all who attended. If you call someone, they will ask for a summary of the conversation in email. CYA, you need to be able to point at anything you were told, or told someone, no matter how small or petty the issue may be.
More will come to me. Maybe I'll write it all up in a kind of cathartic purging and post it somewhere. I sense a Doctoral Thesis here....
I set up rules and filters. At my current company, people are good at keeping discussions in the appropriate mail lists, so I can easily bucket discussions into different priorities.
At a previous job, people used to spam their status reports so that they could look busy. Whenever I would get widely-distributed status reports or other useless communication from someone who I didn't know, I would immeditatly set up a rule in Outlook to dump all email from that person into a special SPAM folder.
No, I will not work for your startup
Back in the dot com boom this was pretty bad, and partly I think it's because everyone feels they have to have a voice or be mega assertive in order for their new idea to be heard. Right now there's a lot of new ideas (good and bad) and folks just want their piece of the action. What is different is the one liners, which is a product of culture emphasizing rush rush rush, push push push, hurry hurry hurry. I've noticed a resurgence of "how r u" as well, even from supposedly smart people.
Lane Myer: I have great fear of tools. I once made a birdhouse in woodshop and the fair housing committee condemned it.
a) Easier to track (sometimes): If you organize your email correctly, you can have an "in" and "out" workflow system for various persons/projects that outlines the tasks and communication(s) from start to finish
b) Easier to remember: Sometimes you might not remember the exact change that Larry stopped by your desk to request whilst you already had 1000001 things going. Again, if it's organized in email, it's easier to note the specifics later.
c) Accountability. When Bob asks you to change setting "X" and it hoses your company server for an hour, it's on record in email. When you requested 5 times that Sally do an important update so you could complete your own work, and it was ignored (thus making your work late), it's on record. When you remind people of things to avoid because he consistently makes the same mistake, it's on record. It's a coldhearted thing sometimes, but I've noticed that it's also more motivational to certain varieties of people if you re-send an old email saying "this is due tonight and is critical" with a CC to the boss...