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.

mollydot's picture

jthurman Says: Along with overuse of...

jthurman Says: 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've taken to saying yes when I read something sent to a lot of people and not relevant to me, in the hopes that the sender will eventually be annoyed enough to turn off receipt request.

hop Says: 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. Or worse again, hitting reply, changing the subject and not deleting the content, or sometimes not even changing the subject line. Or on yahoo groups, replying to a digest mail and quoting the entire digest.

 
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