The Elegant Email(randsinrepose.com)
randsinrepose.com
The Elegant Email
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2012/10/14/the_elegant_email.html
9 comments
There is a good point made. Which is that email sucks as a long form communication medium. One quickly gets lost (and as a result loses a lot of time) managing "conversations". It is also very hard to get some sort of continuity with email, because everybody uses it differently. People will often reply with multiple emails when asnwering a group of questions that you sent them. Adding their own questions on top of it, and making it a mess of spaghetti.
Not that rich. I could write a two-sentence email on why I think blog posts should be long and well thought-out without irony; why not the reverse?
All you folks working on automated email tools, workflows and specialized HTML-JavaScript-CSS mail formatters?
Stop. Read this. Consider whether your tool adds to human experiences or should be replaced by a webpage with a FAQ.
Stop. Read this. Consider whether your tool adds to human experiences or should be replaced by a webpage with a FAQ.
If you find that you must send a long email full of information and questions (a meeting is impossible due to distance or scheduling), please be sure to break it down by recipient/department and bullet point for them! 14 long paragraphs with actions for a person spread around unevenly is no way to communicate.
I find that some spam filters will mark your email as spam if it has a "poetic" subject line. For this reason I stick to the point. Perhaps it is because spam email subject lines are poetic as well.
Is he being ironic about the signature? I thought it should be "as short as possible"...
I did him a favor of shortening it.
http://tldr.io/tldrs/507b5e078edaf0c942000faa
BTW - "I do not believe email is not a long form communication medium, and my rule of thumb is that an email should be no longer than three (or four) paragraphs. You might hate this stipulation."
I assume this is a typo?