Look, if I send you an email and ask you to reach out to a third party to get some info for me, don’t forward our whole damn conversation to the third party and ask for the info. Especially not if I (web developer) am griping about their (web designer) work and/or lack of response. They don’t need to know our private business! Send a separate email!
Also when I am the third party don’t forward me your whole convo and have me scroll down through 7 days of your correspondence to figure out what the other party is asking about. SUMMARIZE THAT SHIT and tell me what you need from me!
And unless you’re a doctor’s office or a lawyer’s office, you do not need some fancy “secure email system” that causes me to need to log in to a whole separate system to get your reply. You’re a web marketing company, you don’t need that level of security for me to get the Meta Description tag you need me to use.
I just do not understand these email practices. Does anyone else get what I’m coming from? Do the people you work with/clients do this to you too?
At this point, I just assume that anything I put in an email will get forwarded to pretty much everyone else on the planet. As a consequence, I either reign in my criticism or, more frequently of late, just don’t give a fuck if someone gets offended about it.
As for being send a ginormous email chain with a question like, “What do you think of this?”, implying that I should read back through ten printed pages of back and forth with people who can’t or won’t use correct grammar, punctuation, or appropriate word choice, and are often as not just talking past one another, I usually respond with a quote either from Shakespeare or Carlin, like “Brevity is the soul of wit,” or “Some people have no idea what they’re doing, and a lot of them are really good at it.”
My husband’s little web development company was purchased by EY (nee Earnst & Young) which isn’t a doctor or a lawyer, but does handle a lot of confidential info. As a result, he had to deal with a cast amount of security overhead, including secure data transfer protocols. For, you know, public-facing website info.
It drive him nuts, and he left.
But you may be dealing with something like that, a subsidiary of a company that actually has security needs for some of what they do.
(And yes, of course they should trim the email to the relevant part. How annoying.)
This also applies to social media, like Facebook, Instagram, etc. If you’re surprised someone saw your post, comment, opinion, then you’re an idiot and you should disconnect from all social media immediately. I’m still surprised how many people get fired for stupid social-media posts. We just had a training on this at work. You can’t post videos of squirrels having sex or photos of a whale penis. Who knew?
The key thing to understand is that nobody else gives a crap about doing quality work. All, quite literally all, they care about is processing the unending flood of email in their inbox before it explodes. Them clicking [forward] after a quick glance takes 5 seconds. Them writing a summary and sending that takes 5 minutes. Nobody else has the extra 4 minutes and 55 seconds to deal with your needs. If you want it summarized and forwarded, then summarize it yourself.
Yes, this is totally unproductive and stupid. No, you’re not going to change it.
The best thing you can do is as quickly as possible cut out all middlemen & get direct contact to the people who can answer your questions. If half the damn world wants to be cc-ed before they’ll let you make that direct contact, just say “yes” and cc them. It costs you no extra work, and fills their inbox with crap. Which reduces the free time they have each day to bug you. Win-win!
My late first wife was an attorney. Most of her clients were banks. Most of them had the secure email crap, though she did not. Lots of big businesses are going that way driven by legit concerns for regulatory compliance and record retention that matter deeply to them, if not you. In many ways the 21st Century sux. This is one of them.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. The sooner you abandon hope for the hopeless, the sooner you will achieve a state of Zen.
I’m just looking for the County of Complacency, or maybe the Village of Insouciance. I’d even take Neamhaireachm Mór if they have a decent single pot still distillery.
Unrelated email rant: some people don’t seem to understand the purpose of an email subject field. I worked with this guy whose email subjects were generally the first few words of the first sentence in his email, or something equally uninformative about the content of the email. These are literally some of the subjects of emails I received from him (ellipses copied verbatim):
Take a look at …
I think …
Are you?
Will you guys do …
If you …
Try the …
I dunno if this helps …
Oh, also …
I’ll be …
Well, when it comes it Islay Scotch I’m more of a Laphroaig fan myself, but I was actually thinking of a nice taste of the Irish there, maybe a Redbreast or Midleton.
Stranger
Oh, the gods, I hate these! I look at the body of the email and try to figure out how this disjointed sentence means anything only to realize that you have to combine the subject line like some kind of spycraft routine. And then there are the people whose message is all a series of ellipses…in a stream of consciousness…broken up…into different parts…with no regard…for grammar or coherency…and usually ending…with some kind of ambiguous question?!?
I always just sent those back with a one-word response: “incomprehensible”
Didn’t even include my sig block which was auto-loaded. It was worth the extra couple seconds of my time to delete the sig block just for the emphasis of the raw contempt of a one-word reply.
I too was a huge Laphroiag fan until ~4 years ago.
Since they switched to selling the 10yo swill for $70 or the 25yo for $750 when you can find it, and eliminated everything in between I’ve been left high and dry by them. Their 18 was nectar, but that case is gone, gone, gone.
Tonight was some Angel’s Envy Rye on the rocks. Scotch is taken only neat.
I also hate when people switch subjects in the middle of an email thread. So two months later I’m trying to find an email about “client site A” but none of my emails have subjects about that.
I’m glad my email app has a very nice search feature where I can search x and y and z and zz so I can try to find the right emails by a bunch of keywords.
My wife’s boss is that master of not including the identifying information in either the subject matter (best) or even in the body of the email, making it impossible to search for.
I love the email line is when people tell me that if I am not the intended receipient of confidential information I am legally banned from relaying the information to anyone else. I think that holds the same validity and me telling you that I am not liable for the rocks and chunks of concrete coming out of my uncovered truck because you are less than 200 feet behind me.
But the all-time classic is when someone accidentally sends the email to the wrong list. Thus begins the myriad of Reply All’s with:
Why did I get this?
I think you sent this to me by mistake.
Take me off this email list!
Etc.
50% of these people are 100% trolling, and it can turn into a hilarious work of art.
I heartily endorse this rant, and particularly in the era of working from home if we’re still in it. Email is all we’ve got, people! Besides Zoom meetings which are their own species of hell, email and maybe PMs of some form and (please God no) texts are all we’ve got to communicate with. Make them count! Organize your thoughts and include a specific request for action. Spell things correctly – this helps greatly with searching later on. Finally, be courteous. If I only ever hear from you via email and you never ever use punctuation, salutations or signoffs, I have to assume you’re a dick.
