I have two co-workers who never–NEVER–enter subject lines. They’re both very competent and personable. And almost every day I have some work related issue that they are seeking advice on.
But I guess if that’s all I have to complain about in my job, things are actually pretty good.
Most email clients pop a warning if no subject is entered. Either they’re turned theirs off (and could be induced to turning it back on) or just click through it every time (in which case they could be convinced to put at least one useful work in the subject).
Or not. People find the most peculiar ways to ‘save time.’
Not as annoying as people who put the whole message in the subject line, and leave the message field blank.
Fortunately I don’t have to deal with e-mail for work. Any name I don’t recognize or without a subject gets deleted without opening.
no
Nice :).
Yes, it’s mildly annoying. Yes, we should be thankful if that is the worst thing we can find to moan about.
It could become really annoying if someone did this regularly and the search function on your email client doesn’t work very well.
This… I work with several people who do that. 99% of the time I need more information than what they squeezed in the subject line.
Well, not really. Just kidding.
meh, I do it about half the time, but it’s usually an email I’m sending to someone that’s (more or less) expecting it and they’re probably not going to be saving it.
I get more annoyed by subject lines that have little enough to do with the actual subject that I have to resend it to myself to change the subject, which then of course means the “From” line is wrong.
A few times I’ve asked the sender to include certain keywords in the subject line for just that reason. For example, just flipping through my saved emails, I see one that just says “Claim #_____” and the body of the email just asks me to see the attachment. As I recall, some time later, dealing with the same adjuster on another case, I asked her please add the employee’s name to the subject line so I could find it again some day.
At least the search function on Thunderbird works reasonably well.
That doesn’t bother me as much as the idiot coworkers who set up meetings with no information about what the meeting is for.
None of this is as annoying to me as what my Mother-in-Law does. She always puts something like “re: 2/20/17” as the subject in her emails. Never anything that’s actually useful to search by. Fortunately her emails are all ephemeral.
I worked with a woman who was in the middle, which unlike most compromises somehow wound up being worse… She started her train of thought in the subject line and would
randomly pick up the thought mid-phrase in the body of the email. Made no damn sense and threw off searches and such.
My boss. He has the “subject” heading in his email program turned off (since he never uses them). Then when he has to find an older email he has to ask what day it was sent so he can go poke around for a while.
Bawahahaha 
No subject heading scores a 1 on the ANSI 10-point annoyance factor rating.
I have the opposite issue with my coworkers. We have very strict data privacy rules that state we are not to put any identifying information in the subject line. Every day I get emails from the county attorney’s office and the courts with party names/court file numbers listed brightly. When I respond, I’ll change the subject line to something generic (Court Order, Assistance Needed, etc), which they will invariably change back to chock full o’ info when they respond.
I used to live in a place with a neighborhood email group or list, or whatever you want to call it. There were enough emails missing subject lines that I complained to the guy who maintained the list and the server. I guess I annoyed him enough that he programmed into the software that every email had to have a subject line. No subject line, the email would not go anywhere. I won the battle.
More like an 8 here. I get multiple hundreds of emails every day. They fall into three broad priority levels:
The subject line helps me determine which broad priority level an email fits. A blank subject line means that email will be opened only after all others have been prioritized and/or worked. The only exception would be if I indicate to someone that I need a specific file or email forwarded to me ASAP and don’t take the time to type a subject or message.
I have no problem responding to a generic meeting invitation with “Please let me know the purpose of the meeting and what input I/my team are expected to provide”.