The art of writing emails
Today a colleague forwarded me this article comparing American and European emailing behaviour. While reading this and thinking about email in general, I felt the urge to write down what bothers me when it comes to email-handling at work.
It seems that the majority of ppl with access to email just doesn’t have any clue how to use the medium correctly. This might not be even the fault of the individual, but of the companies responsible for so-called ‘email-clients’ (microsoft, anyone?), web-mail-services and so on. Good defaults are essential but most applications show a remarkable lack of them. Sure, I’m somewhat biased against MS, but that’s for a reason. If you’re not tied to Outlook, get a decent mail-client.
While it may be nice (in fact, it isn’t) to write some fancy email with graphics (we surely need animated gifs in our x-max mails, don’t we?), heavy text-formatting and proprietary office documents just containing an image addressed to a friend or family, it’s totally out-of-place for business communication. In there we need information, not eye candy. I don’t need colours to visualize some sort of bad quoting (I’ll get to that later). Having 500bytes of information embedded in 37kb of html-tags is simply ridiculous.
Then of course there’s the difficulty of answering mail. Often we want to refer to something written in the previous email. But instead of using the very effective methods of quoting common on UseNet and mailing lists, we use what is called ‘TOFU’-mails (German acronym, translated as “text at top, full-quote at the bottom”). Having a correspondence of 12 mails, everything TOFU, the previous content always indented by outlook, is pretty nasty to read. Also, there’s just no way to get such mails in shape again.
A nice thing every company has to have is signatures. Having pretty extensive disclaimers which have no or little legal basis anyway but outweigh the actual contend at least 2:1. As if this would not be bad enough, it’s added to the bottom every time (outlook defaults). So after playing ping-pong 23 times, I have that disclaimer repeated about 12 times on the bottom of my mail. I don’t think that this will help to make anyone actually read the damn thing.
The article also mentions privacy issues and the usage of confidential information. Let’s compare postcards to letters. All our emails are postcards. It’s not only that the envelope isn’t sealed, there actually _is_ no envelope. Everyone with some basic knowledge of TCP/IP can read just every unencrypted mail without much effort. Hail to network sniffers.
Would you entrust some of the content you send around the globe by email to a simple postcard? I thought so, but still you do.
And it’s not just about privacy. If you’re not signing your mails how should someone know that you are the one you appear to be? There’s decent software enabling to do just all of this, e.g. gnupg or pgp, a feasible mail-client will support this out-of-the-box.
Well, enough for now. Maybe I brought up a point worth thinking about.