43 Folders

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Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.

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”What’s 43 Folders?”
43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

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 that will happen to me if I ever reveal the contents of your privileged, confidential (and unencrypted) message
  3. The unrequested press release (and the serial ignoring of the "Unsubscribe" I sent you for the previous seven press releases)
  4. The graphical background, font and table tags, and remaining 14k of HTML cruft associated with every. single. message. you've ever sent
  5. The including of my -- plus 98 other strangers' -- personal email addresses in the "To:" line of your friendly reminder about Tyler's birthday party

Friend: I love you, but you must evolve.

hop's picture

I've got another one that...

I've got another one that I'd "love for people to lose":

When you are subscribed to a mailing list, please, please, pretty please, do not start a new thread by reusing a mail that came from that list, hitting the reply button, deleting all the content and filling in your new topic.

Your mail software still remembers the old unique ID of that mail and my mail software (and any web archive of the mailing list) will display it alongside the mails of the original thread.

[unfair sideblow] If you want to see an example, just look at the mailing list of any old time unix tool that has recently acquired some followers among OS X users. hrmpf remind cough.

I will not read threads with the topic "announcement: Wyrd 0.1.0", but i would help you with your problems compiling remind on OS X. If I had only read your mail...

 
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