Killing Mind

Subject: Re: FW: RE: RE: {Possibly Spam} FW: AW: Oh here's the subject over he...

i agree

Kind Regards,

Jo Blow

Phone: 12345678

Mobile: 098765432121

Address: 2 Who Cares St
Shit town

----- Original Message -----
From: Someone Else
Sent: 10:10 Date Time, Offset, Timezone, blah blah.
To: Obvious Filler
CC: Other People, I Shouldn't, Know About
Subject: Variation on themes
Importance: Always high
Sensitivity: Always sensitive

• Language specific "RE:" text. No, bloody no. The standard is "RE" and using alternate language equivalents like "AW" just breaks software that tries to spot the "RE" tag.
• {Possibly Spam} and it's ilk. Don't screw up my email threading and subject viewing practices with some half-hearted attempt at spam detection. That's what X-Whatever: headers are for.
• HTML email. Please, please, think long and hard about whether you need to send me a web page. Will plain text do? Will I really agree with your choice of colours? Are you sure that your layout design will be to my taste, more so than my own email viewing settings? Am I sure to be reading this in a GUI, or might I be accessing via some text interface? Will your oversized letters fit on my mobile device screen? Is it necessary to send the HTML code, which at least doubles and typically triples or 4x the size of the email data? Do you want your email to look like spam? Is the content important, or the pretty border? Would you like to spoil any searching systems one might want to use? Do you really want to corrupt web mailing list archive systems? Are you aware that your style of HTML may be different to others participating in the thread, ruining the flow of the conversation? When all these considerations are made, and the HTML in the email is still necessary... just send me a link to a web page instead.
• Template salutations If everyone of your emails ends with "kind regards" then it's meaningless. In fact, it's worse than that - it's often inappropriate (that is, jaringly misplaced) and sounds trite.
• Template personal details If I know you, I don't need your phone and fax number everytime you email me - it stinks of carelessness or pretentiousness. If I don't, then please use the standards for signature formatting, so they don't mess up email threads.
• Including headers in reply. Why was this ever a good idea? I don't need 7 lines of attribution to figure out the who and when of the previous email. I certainly don't need the email address or subject repeated. All you need is something like the standard attribution line that has been around for over a decade: "On this day, this person wrote this:" Done!
• Importance flags. I'll figure out what is important to me. No one ever marks their email unimportant, so your "important" tag has the opposite effect to probable intention.
• HTML indication of quoted sections. What if I want to quote the quotes? What if your HTML style doesn't match others in the thread? What if I want to see at a glance who a quote is attributed to? What if I want to reply to sections of an email, at different quote levels? HTML breaks all that. What does it add?

What really stinks in all this is that Joe Emailer Blow shouldn't have to know what the hell I'm on about. Email defaults before the Outlook generation were, in general, sane, and email was well formatted. That's because people who care about such things have thought long and hard, and implemented intelligent, robust conventions.

So by default: an attribution is one line; quotes are indented with a greater than sign; content is in plain text; signatures are prefixed with a dash-dash-space; signatures are removed when replying; RE: and FW: tags are added intelligently; etc.. The mere fact that defaults are set with care and thought means that those that don't care don't ruin it for those that do. That's pretty powerful.

The point is that this is destruction of sense has been implemented by people who should know better and have the power to change things. Of course, as in any situation where new technology is being developed, the pressures from those that don't know better is significant.