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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?"
I just wish that my co-workers could learn to spell and use decent grammar. Not would, could.
Love sees no species.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
{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
Yes, sending confidential commercial information via a third party is an excellent recommendation and one I fully endorse. I also suggest you use MSN Messenger for shorter conversations.
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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.
That's a really good idea.
This text added to reach the 100 character minimum so that it isn't marked as spam.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
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.
On behalf of your poor coworkers...stop doing that. I can't stand the morons in my company that can't distinguish between the reply and reply all buttons. Second to that in annoyance is the people who indiscriminately send company wide emails.
Seriously. With about half a second of actual thought you can actually avoid clogging everyone else's inbox with crap.
But the "reply all" feature should reply to everyone in the discussion, not just to the ones that were included in the last email.
Actually, whoever came up with the reply all button should be tried for war crimes at the Hague.
I like top posting. I want to see the message that is for me at the top, and not to have to scroll through a series of replies to get to where my message really begins. Plus, if it was relevant to me I've probably already seen it, although it's nice to have for context.
So why don't you note these instructions down? If he speaks too fast, ask him to slow down, as you are writing it down so you don't miss a step. He will understand and appreciate it. It is your responsibility to get it right. If you can't remember everything and don't take notes, you rightfully get negative feedback about it. He is your boss, it is his choice of communication medium, you have to deal with it in the best way you can.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
Because they sign your paychecks?