May 20, 2008
Most people know someone (often an older relative) who have poor e-mail etiquette with respect to things like e-mail forwards. For those of you who are aggressive enough to try to modify this behavior, but passive/lazy enough to not want to compose your viewpoint, Merlin Mann brings you Thanks. No.
Even though it goes to great pains to be polite, I think I'd still feel too dickish replying with this site. Although somehow I have no issue replying with Snopes links that debunk some of the urban legend chain e-mails.
More annoyances -- those dhtml 'survey' things that pop up in-page and obscure the whole fucking page you're reading. An in-page popup ad is one thing. All it does is announce "this website is a gutter tramp whore," but hey, someone's gotta feed the kids.
A survey is more like smearing shit on your windshield and then offering to clean it for a dollar. "Tell us how to improve our website. This in-page popup lets us normalize the results against a baseline of the most aggressive anti-usability feature jQuery allows."
This rant brought to you by a microsoft.com MSDN page.
Meh. If 5 sentences (or less) works for you, hurrah, and I wouldn't object to adopting it as a general office policy. But I rank getting an honest to god, informative, LONG personal email up with getting actual personal snail mail (rare but does happen, at least in my world) -- obviously, these are from people I do not hear from 18 times a day, or even once a day.
The no-thanks page seems like a good idea, although I'd prob just tell someone directly if it really bothered me that much. I am also a Snopes responder (though i don't buy the 15-min minimum, sorry mrflip), and I think that's easier b/c you want someone to have correct information (and NOT spread bad information), whereas when you tell them you don't want their forwards, it seems like a personal judgment about their sense of humor, political views, being behind the curve, etc (even if it's not).
The Inbox series does sound intriguing; I'll have to check it out. At work, I'm ruthless with my inbox -- almost everything is instantly color-coded, filed, or trashed (replied to if necessary in combination with one of these) -- but I know a lot of people whose inboxes cause them serious angst. I think one guy at my last office had never filed anything despite having enough familiarity with the software to have disabled the auto-archiving feature, so as a result had an inbox with over 30K messages. Talk about driving your IT dept insane. ("No sir, we don't know why you have issues when logging into email from Turkey...")
My personal email is a different story... but I heart Gmail as a result. The spam filter alone saves me from 90% of my email grief, making it much easier/less stressful/less annoying to deal with the bad forwards. :)
So... I can't decide if I'm assertive or a jerk, but when I get emails that I can snope, I snope 'em (in under 3 minutes). I usually get polite emails back thanking me for debunking/allaying their fears. Sometimes the response is sheepish, but I've never gotten the feeling I embarrassed or offended the person.
I very rarely forward material (the 2004 campaign would be an exception...), and if I don't appreciate what people are sending me, I can usually tell just from the email title. I delete with abandon and move on. No one seems offended that I don't respond.
A trickier topic for me is texting. I never initiate a text exchange and prefer to respond with a phone call when someone texts me. Clearly that is not appropriate text etiquette. I'll have to ask Ms. Manners about this.
That's 15 minutes flip time, with internet time dilation.
To be clear, I don't think snopesing is bad manners unless done with bad manners, and in fact is the right thing to do -- I just wonder if it's really that important.
TWiTB: I have no problem with your text policy, and I think phone call in resp. to text is always acceptable. I think it's obnoxious that receivers pay for texts (and often, can't opt out); I try to keep track of who is (GMcD, Vanalyn, Valatan) and who is not (most everyone else, I think) a texter.
The bowling team has settled that one non-frivolous text is acceptable during normal bedtime hours -- for example a 2am Friday "hey we're drunk want to give us a ride if you're up otherwise we'll take a cab" or a Sunday 9am "come meet us for breakfast tacos".
Probably the worst usability flaw with the iPhone (and this is tellingly minor): since you can't get MMS (photo text msgs), you get instead a text that says "You have an MMS! go to fuckyoucustomer.com/weareuseless and login with username 5asdf234h and password mownrune" (I'm not kidding -- the username is gobbledygook and the password is *slightly* memorable). And you can't click it, you have to *write it down* then open the browser then *type all that shit in*. Can you tell what ONE FEATURE Apple left for AT&T to implement? Why don't they just route it to my email, which has full graphics and media support?
Since I like lists:
1. I somewhat started implementing five.sentenc.es to some of my replies, but that I mostly to shorten the response time and to the point, getting rid of formalities I don't really mean.
salutation. brief question about well-being. second brief question about work/school/family member.
real reason i am writing.
**
2. I, too, send Snopes replies, like ms cegenation, for the purpose of wanting someone to have correct information.
I, on the other hand, will also ask the person to send a correction to everybody who got the original e-mail. This because I think that if I were spreading misinformation and was corrected, then I would send a correction. The other reason is because I think a person should check on something that may be deemed questionable before forwarding.
Lastly, I do send messages that almost border to the level of harassment if no such correction is sent. This is because surely, if they were able to spend time on sending misinformation they surely should be able to send a correction.
**
3. Following TWITB, I also Delete and move on (e-mails from my dad, text messages from Mike). But, what I don't understand is the logic that goes on before sending e-mails or text messages. I mean, I don't text raunchy jokes, so what makes somebody think that I like receiving them? I don't e-mail PowerPoint presentation with cute little panoramas, so what makes you think that I like receiving them?
With regards to sending a Forward (to those who don't follow AE), I do it following the same posting format that I use on AE.
On AE:
Title (with embeded URL) - Note
On e-mail:
Title
URL
Note
Unlike Thanks.No. I do have a tendency to put e-mails on To: and not Bcc: mostly for people to Reply All. Remember life before AE?
Usually, friends not wanting to participate on Gmail conversations within the same e-mail usually send a message to all with the word "unsubscribe" in the body.
Where do people stand on the emoticon, while a) emailing, b) IM'ing. I use them in both, even in work emails (tho for work emails more sparingly.) A recent poll of bowling physicists revealed I was one of the few who used them.
Also: how much editing do you do on emails/ims/blog comments? I probably end up changing any given sentence of an email or online comment several times, and even an IM. It's very slow, but that's what it takes to say what I mean. Ndogg was ripping on ebflagg for Using complete capitalization and punctuation in his IMs. Which I also do to a certain extent, with the occasional IIRC or w/e.
I also use them in both, although I'm aware that some people consider that lame. Capital J in Wingdings seems to be fairly popular at work based on an informal survey of my recent memory.
I use emoticons sparingly. (Although strangely enough I used one in 1993 in the typed senior messages in my yearbook.) I tend to use them only after I have made a comment that could be interpreted in a few ways and I want to clarify.
I use proper capitalization, spelling and grammar (or at least my best guess at each) in emails unless it is a quick response to something.
For IM'ing, I almost always use lower case and everything is optimized for speed. Half my IM's are to coworkers with whom I could just verbally communicate in a fraction of the time it takes to type anything.
I always preview AE comments to try to catch any mistakes or sentences that could be unclear, but don't generally fiddle with the wording too much or too often.
One thing I never do: type "LOL". (except just now) Most people are never laughing out loud when they type that and therefore are lying. I may say "That's funny. Or type "ha, ha".
Emoticons are something that I tend to use quite a bit, mostly to indicate sarcasm or whatever. Internet abbreviations 'u' for 'you' 'r' for 'are' and their ilk, however, are something that I avoid in all conversation, including Text messages. I try to use correct capitalization and punctuation when I'm IMing, but I'm also not obsessively exacting about correcting down what I've written.
I try to use correct capitalization and punctuation when sending e-mails.
I try to use correct capitalization and punctuation when sending an IM.
I do not use emoticons, unless I am copying something somebody said or if I am ridiculing somebody for using emoticons WAY too much, particularly older women who have just discovered THE INTERNET and their crappy forwards. This is usually noted by the fact that I will also add initialisms such as "OMG" or something similar.
I also do not use IM abbreviations, such as "u" and "r". I find them annoying, unless they are used jokingly or to make a point.
I try to edit and proofread what I wrote before sending it out, but the level of proofreading is due to the amount of time I have until the next thing I have to do starts.
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What I really need is one of these for facebook. "Gee, I like you, but I FUCKING HATE pyramid schemes and chain letters, and would really rather be ignored than poked."
I also too often send the snopes reply, even with its 15minutes minimum commitment (and that's assuming you can avoid the siren call of surfing snopes for the next hour).
There's also five.sentenc.es. I think the best way to do this with either (5.s.es or nothanks) is to /put it in your sig/ -- makes it a bit easier to bring up when Aunt Judy sends you a re-mail with dancing kitties telling the story of a dying soldier who will get a gift certificate to Outback if you pump your gas early in the morning because Nigerian jenkem-smoking kids have taken "In God We Trust" off of the dollar bill.
Oh, and the Inbox Zero series is supposed to be excellent.
posted by mrflip at 10:29AM CST on May 20