A couple of random things that annoy me about people and email:
- People that use a work/ISP email address for personal stuff
Ok, I understand, not everybody gets a lot of email. Some people, especially older people, have to use email at work and they still do stuff like actually talk on their phones when they’re out of the office. I’m willing to just give those people a pass for the moment and just focus on the younger people – the people around my age – right now.
The people that have been using email for going on 10 years, maybe more.
Last week I got an email from this guy that does party promotions (whom I did NOT give my email address to, but that’s a topic for another post), promoting some party. This guy sent an email out to his list, which is nothing unusual, but the thing that I really didn’t understand was that he sent this email out from his Accenture email account. Now my first instinct when writing about that was to spit some venom, but I asked a friend that works at Accenture and he didn’t seem to think it was a big deal or a violation of whatever email policies Accenture has, so that’s probably the wrong angle to take on it. So I’m going to try and put forth something a little more calm.
Basically, I can’t understand why a person would even want to use their work email address for something like this. I don’t see how it is their best interests for one, simple, reason – what happens when you no longer work there? This is the same principle that comes to mind when seeing people that only use an email address from their ISP (i.e. _____@comcast.net). What happens if you move to another city that has a different provider? All that stuff you were relying on in your email account is mostly gone, and on top of that you have to let people know that you have a new email address and you always wonder about that person that you haven’t talked to in a few years that is gonna try to email you but only has the old address. Maybe the rest of you don’t think about that though, I do.
It is especially confusing to me because it’s not like it’s difficult to get a web-based email address. They’re free, you know. How long has hotmail been around? Between that, yahoo and gmail, you’ve gotta like one of those. Running out of space isn’t even an issue anymore like it used to be, yahoo is unlimited space and the rest are big enough to take you a while to fill them up. If you use a gmail account, you can even download the messages into whatever email program you use on your computer for free and don’t have to deal with the irritating flashing ads the other two have. Why not just get an account with one of those? I honestly want someone that doesn’t use one to help me understand this. Is it just because you’re used to it and don’t see a reason to change something that works? Am I spending too much time thinking about something that just doesn’t matter?
- BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy – use it
I shouldn’t even have to explain this, if you are sending something out to a group of people, your default instinct should be to use the bcc option, because most of them probably don’t want to see all the one-word replies going back to you. Unless you’re trying to foster an email discussion, and you’re sure that everyone you’re sending it to wants to be part of that discussion, don’t subject them to that. The only possible exception to this is if you’re sending something to a huge amount of people because then someone will usually get pissed at all the replies and you can get a nice little email argument going on. Those are good for a laugh on a slow day at work, but only every once in a while.
- E