jkroon

I’ve recently started to see this trend more and more.  I’m receiving an increasing amount with mail absoltely no subject line.  And in some rarer cases, a totally inappropriate subject line.

Those that know me know I read a reasonable amount of email on a daily basis.  More so than most.  I also often have to go back and find specific emails in order to reply on them.  This is becoming a nuisance of a task since it’s becoming increasingly difficult to locate the message on which I intend to reply.  Subject lines like “Re: ” or “Fw: ” is nothing new, but it stays as annoying as not having a chair to sit on when working.

My question is simple:  has the use of somewhat usable subjects been deprecated some time recently?   Did I just miss the memo?

Another trend is to email me a support ticket.  When this gets resolved, the guy replies on that particular ticket, regarding a totally non-related issue, querying something else, so now the original ticket gets re-opened, and the ticket subject does not match the actual request at all.  This is highly annoying.  A similar situation exists where instead of just creating a new email a person will go and _find_ (IE: go to some amount of effort) an old email from you, and reply on that.  It is IMHO much easier and faster to simply press ^N, and start typing the person’s name, let auto-completion do it’s job.  As a result I find it insanely hard to imagine why anybody would do the effort to do the wrong thing when it’s easier to do the right thing.  I mean, it’s actually effort to go and reply to a previous email as one should do when wanting to reply on a previous email.

Anyway … here’s to hoping it’s not just me that has an issue with the seeming lack of proper use of subject lines.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Email. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.