Descriptive subject lines and plain text -- is it really that difficult?
A pet peeve of mine is email notices sent out with "Important notice" in the subject line. Or the one I received this morning: "EXCITING TALK SESSION FOR UKZN STUDENTS". What's the talk about? Why is it exciting? Why should I read the notice instead of hitting delete? The top line of the notice is "EXCITING STUDY ABROAD TALK SESSION FOR UKZN STUDENTS". Why couldn't that be the subject line? On a vaguely related note, the notice offers an exchange program to "Palestine". Last I heard, the country was called "Israel". That's another of my pet peeves, but I won't rant about it now.
On to the second item in the (notably descriptive) subject -- plain text. I can think of several reasons offhand that you might want to send out your notice as a word processor document instead of copy/pasting the text into the email client. Hear this, people: NONE OF THEM ARE GOOD ENOUGH! Did you get that? I hope so. If you want pretty fonts and poster type stuff, print a poster. If you really need to send it in an email, at least use an open standard like pdf. Aside from the inconvenience value of saving the attachment, opening up OpenOffice (I refuse to run Word, even if I happen to be on an OS that supports it), opening the file and reading the two paragraphs of plain unformatted text the moron on the other side has sent, there's also the possibility of viruses spreading themselves in the docs. While that doesn't affect me directly, network downtime due to widespread virus infections has put a major damper on my week more than once.
The absolute worst is the notices that arrive, exhorting me in the subject line to "read the attached document". I am now going to devote the next hour to writing the definitive reply to such notices. The ones that arrive by email I can't reply to (because there's no way of getting hold of the person who originally posted them) but the web notice system (in which people commit the same offenses) has a handy little "posted by" email link. When the reply's written I'll update this post with a link to it :-)
[edit] Here's the link: http://www.jerith.za.net/notice-netiquette.
[re-edit] Linked within my shiny new website at http://www.jerith.za.net/notice-netiquette.php.
On to the second item in the (notably descriptive) subject -- plain text. I can think of several reasons offhand that you might want to send out your notice as a word processor document instead of copy/pasting the text into the email client. Hear this, people: NONE OF THEM ARE GOOD ENOUGH! Did you get that? I hope so. If you want pretty fonts and poster type stuff, print a poster. If you really need to send it in an email, at least use an open standard like pdf. Aside from the inconvenience value of saving the attachment, opening up OpenOffice (I refuse to run Word, even if I happen to be on an OS that supports it), opening the file and reading the two paragraphs of plain unformatted text the moron on the other side has sent, there's also the possibility of viruses spreading themselves in the docs. While that doesn't affect me directly, network downtime due to widespread virus infections has put a major damper on my week more than once.
The absolute worst is the notices that arrive, exhorting me in the subject line to "read the attached document". I am now going to devote the next hour to writing the definitive reply to such notices. The ones that arrive by email I can't reply to (because there's no way of getting hold of the person who originally posted them) but the web notice system (in which people commit the same offenses) has a handy little "posted by" email link. When the reply's written I'll update this post with a link to it :-)
[edit] Here's the link: http://www.jerith.za.net/notice-netiquette.
[re-edit] Linked within my shiny new website at http://www.jerith.za.net/notice-netiquette.php.