Amen. My attitude now is that it’s 2005 and I no longer forgive email or internet ignorance.

And don’t send me any of those stupid virus warnings either - or any other sort of chain email. Learn to use snopes.com. etc… .

Preach on bruthaman. One more to add: If you’re going to forward that chain letter, remove the 29 lines of “>>>>>>>>>>>>>> BOB SAID” that just makes any e-mail violently unreadable.

Whenever I receive a message with that horrible semi-lawyer speak at the end, I use the following signature in my reply:

DISCLAIMER:

By sending an email to ANY of my addresses you are agreeing that:

1. I am by definition, “the intended recipient”;
2. All information in the email is mine to do with as I see fit and make such financial profit, political mileage, or good joke as it lends itself to. In particular, I may quote it on my weblog;
3. I may take the contents as representing the views of your company;
4. This overrides any disclaimer or statement of confidentiality that may be included on your message.

And don’t forget:

• Copying the contents of the 20 previous emails in the sequence at the end of your email without ever referring to them;

• Signing off with ‘Kind Regards’ (it doesn’t mean anything).

Re: serial unsolicited commercial emails after unsubscribe requests

Do you by any change run any computer (say, a DSL router or wifi AP) which permits users to connect to the internet, for example to read their email? If so, I’d say you’re an Internet Access Service Provider under the definition in CAN-SPAM, and you can certainly feel free to let the spammer who refuses to unsubscribe you from their list know that. And cc the corporate counsel and/or CEO on your next unsubscribe notice. Be sure to point out that once you’ve notified them not to send you any more unsolicited commercial emails, that if they do so again, that’s clearly willful violation of the law exposing them to treble damages. This strategy has worked great for me in the past. Sometimes it’s tricky to track down the general counsel, but often it’s pretty straightforward.

I’d add

1. Huge, unexpected, and not necessarily relevant attachments. I just received a 1/2 MB attachment of this sort (sort of a press release, more or less), sent to everyone in my department.
2. Minutes of meetings sent as attached .doc files when they could be sent as plain text e-mails (i.e., there’s no complex formatting). Must we be that formal and MSWord-centric?
3. Students who send e-mail without signing (and with no name in the address.) Who are you? Such stuff prompted me to write some guidelines about how to e-mail a professor— http://mleddy.blogspot.com/2005/01/how-to-e-mail-professor.html
4. Elaborate sig files on e-mails from people in your own workplace. Whom do they think they’re writing to?

Mine looked fine in the preview too. Where’d the bold come from?

(Sorry about the weird formatting. Seems to hate OLs)

I’d Add…

The blank email where the entire message is typed into the subject line.

I hate that!

As far as the lawyer-speak goes, for some reason, some companies are requiring employees to use it when they email outside the company. So the sender might not be the person to complain to about it…

The confidentiality disclaimer is annoying, we know, but many of our employers require it for good reasons. And we even use digital sigs & encryption.

I agree with you all. Although my personal experience has been that spam is on the decline—a couple of years ago I got at least 15 a day, but now I get maybe 3 a week. God bless spam filters!

the number 1 email faux-pas i want to eliminate is the wanton reply-all. i don’t need to receive 20 emails that say “good idea emily.” it takes all my breeding not to reply-all 20 times with “I AM NOT EMILY.”

The long lawyer speak gets added at the server, nothing I can do about it.

Another?

Starting a sentence in the subject line and finishing it in the body!

Subject: Can you… Body: …write proper subject lines?!

You have no idea what the email is about…

Email annoyances

Oh yes, these really annoy me too  (from 43 Folders)!

Overusing the high priority flag
The massively longwinded confidential signature line
The unrequested press release 
HTML email
Email addresses of others in the To: box

I’m...

[…] Merlin Mann; Five email tics I’d love for you to lose. A good 5ive on how someone should get evolving. Soon. My favourite: The 18-line sig about all the Bad Things that will happen to me if I ever reveal the contents of your privileged, confidential (and unencrypted) message. […]

Any mail with the “HIGH PRIORITY” flag turned on should be marked as spam and dealt with accordingly. It’s bad manners to shout. Let me decide whether your message is of a high priority.

When I get one of those legalese-laden messages, I send one back with the a

“By reading this you agree to remit $10 to sender.”

When they ask me what that’s all about, I explain the unenforceability of what they’re sending me and how silly it all looks.

Of course, this doesn’t stop them one bit.

Merlin,

I am with you 100%, but you and many of the commenters here should at least be somewhat sympathetic to the poor sods like me who have no control over what our IS departments add to our mail after we hit send. I kept wondering why EVERY PERSON I sent mail to at my new job wrote me back with an annoying lawyerese thing. Then I realized it was being added to my message without my knowledge. :( I try to avoid using my work email account.

Mmmmkay…well, WRT the Perry Mason-style NastyGram sigs, those MIS guys are getting their orders from someone, right? They didn’t just make up that legalese, did they?

So, homework: who in your organization insists on those and could they drop by to cite a few examples of cases where damages were collected based on “violating” them?

I so am not a lawyer, but methinks they are, as we used to say in the original Latin, horse shit.

School Daddy.

God, if I had an affiliate program with Snopes, I’d be a millionaire right now. I can’t stress enough how just about every forward I’ve received has been debunked on on Snopes (usually at the VERY TOP). People, please use some common sense and check Snopes first before sending these warning e-mails to everyone in your addressbook. I appreciate your concern, but please verify it with an external source first.

SNOPES! It’s what’s for dinner!

Along with overuse of the high-priority flag, I hate overuse of the “receipt acknowledgement” flag. When I read a message from certain people, outlook always pops up the dialog box saying “this person has requested acknowledgement that you have read their message.” While I hate seeing that dialog, I’m glad it asks me if I want to send the acknowledgement, and I almost always click NO.

I can see a few cases where using the flag may be good - like today I got an invitation to a dinner party, and the sender said “let me know that you got this message, so I can count on you being there.” In that case, it’s basically an RSVP. The ACK flag would have been fine. Its people who attach the flag to every email they send that make me crazy, and they never get the acknowledgement they think they want. My REPLY to their email should serve as acknowledgement enough. (And I’m very good about replying to email. If I don’t reply, they can assume I didn’t get the message).

Preach on, brother.

However, I must also admit that had someone not committed tic #5 in my direction during the summer of 2001, I probably wouldn’t have reconnected with the woman who is now my wife, so there’s that, too.

I’ve got two for you.. not top five material but definitely in the top ten:

• Using “Reply All” when it is not needed. I get a fair number of FYI emails blasted to me and without fail, some moron will Reply to All with “noted.”

• Replying as an attachment instead of as inline text. The biggest offenders are people on Yahoo or AOL who don’t know any better.

And this one belongs somehwere in the top one hundred - sending Word/Excel/Powerpoint/etc. attachments when the content could very easily have been put into a text email. Ah.. MS giveth (morons powerful tools) and MS taketh away (my sanity).

For me, unless the entire world is on fire, and your have conclusive evidence that the contents of your address book represent the last people in the world unaware of it, I can scarcely think of a reason to send an e-mail to everyone you know.

Honestly, it is like people think they are Paul Revere or something.

Thanking me in advance for my co-operation.

What not to email

Five email tics I’d love for you to lose For the love of God, people; can we get the word out on these? Format courtesy of my other site. 1. The liberal use of the “VERY HIGH PRIORITY!!!” flag 2. The 18-line sig about all the Bad Things…

The follow up email to the unsollicited email I received last week. You think for wasting my time not once but twice I’m going to consider your services?

[…] From Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders blog […]