Home Sweet Homemaker

The subject of email forwards came up at book club this week, reminding me of an interesting post I read recently on Lifehacker. “Email Etiquette Pages Explain So You Don’t Have To” references several websites that you can direct your email-loving friends to in attempt to end the forwarding frenzy. Here is an excerpt from the article.

Why waste time schooling clueless email senders one by one when you can build a web site to do it for you? A recent trend among email-overloaded web developers who don’t want to explain the basics of email etiquette to frequent senders is to set up a web page that does it instead—then reply to senders with a link to the page, or just include it in their signature.

Website “responses” include comments such as: “Hi. The person who sent you this link is a friend who likes you a lot but who wants you to respect their email address, their privacy, and their time” and “The golden rule of sending an email to more than 15 people at a time is Don’t Do It. Seriously. Don’t.” Then there’s the five sentences rule, “a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less”.

It really would be helpful if everyone used BCC, and forwards could be so much shorter if I didn’t have to see the six degrees of separation between myself and the original sender. But the notion that forwards, exposed mailing lists or verbose emails could bother someone so badly that they would buy a domain name and host a website just for the purpose of saying “stop emailing me” is beyond belief. I don’t like the condescending attitude in which these websites are written. My approach is more along the lines of “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say it.” If you must expose the ignorance, try something like this:

• “Hi, friend. I noticed that your recent email was sent to lots of people. Do you mind using the BCC field next time so your mailing list isn’t visible? Thanks.”
• “My inbox has been really overloaded lately. I love getting personal emails from you, but could you keep the forwards to a minimum?”

Regarding long emails, a five sentence rule would be hard to follow. After writing an email, you should just read it, take out the unnecessary parts and hit send. We all ramble, but we should respect someone’s time enough to be succinct by editing our own emails before sending. Ironically, this is probably one of my longest posts of all time! Read the post and the interesting responses it sparked at Lifehacker.com.