I get the “are you sure you want to send this without a title” prompt every time, because I just about never use titles.
Why do they care, and/or why do they think it’s a major omission?
Sometimes I assume that no-title E-mail may be spam.
Also, it makes it a pain in the ass to skim through my inbox and find an e-mail on a particular topic when they aren’t labeled.
The subject field is there for a reason. Not bothering to put one just makes more work for the recipient. When I’ve got dozens of emails to look through, I want to know which are important and which I can safely defer until later.
A lot of people (me included) tend to just delete emails without subject lines. There are also spam filters that automatically kill them.
Agreed that an e-mail without a subject is an e-mail unlikely to be read even if I know the sender. It takes five seconds. Add a subject line, avoid the prompting.
You guys are a tough crowd. I’ll open anything from a friend or colleague unless there is a title that affirmatively suggests DAF (Dumbass Aunt Forward) content.
That’s not very wise, as plenty of spam/virus emails will look like they’re coming from a friend or colleague.
Yeah, I get that a lot of you don’t like emails without titles. I’ve never sent an email w/o a title in my life but it wouldn’t bother me in the least if I received one.
To answer the question posed by the OP, 99.9%+ people intend to put title on their email. Gmail thinks that if their isn’t one that the sender probably forgot it and is doing it as a reminder.
Yup. Worst not-actually-spam I ever saw was from a colleague, had no title, no body, and an attachment with a vague title. I finally did open it after much deliberation, and it was a memo about an upcoming meeting. :smack: Christ, throw me a bone here.
I’m guessing your email looks pretty different from mine. Every day, I get about 25 legitimate emails and 200 spams. A quick kill of all of the messages with Japanese characters in the subject line, or blank subject lines, helps to eliminate the stuff the spam filters missed. Unfortunately, the spam filters tend to kill at least one legitimate email a day, so I end up having to look at most of it anyway.
Yes, my work e-mail, and Gmail (even more so) have good spam filters, allowing only maybe two false negatives and one false positive a day.
Someone posted that 99.9% of legit e-mails have a title. Obviously it’s not that high, but I’m getting the feeling it is pretty high indeed. Am I that much of an outlier? My work e-mails, I do title, but rarely personal ones . . . .
Also, if the person is checking their email online, quite often the way that you read the body of the email is by clicking the title which is shown as a link. A link of exactly 0 characters is unclickable and hence unreadable.
Err . . . my freemail accounts will display “(no subject)” as a placeholder in that field, and then I can click on that. Are you using something kind of exotic?
Good? To me, a spam filter with one false positive a day isn’t good. It’s darned near useless, because it means I have to check every single message it marked.
I can’t recall the last time I received an email from someone else without a subject line. I occasionally send one to myself without a title, but taht’s about it.
I just checked my Gmail spam folder back to Sept. 26 – not a single false positive. Work isn’t near that good. Google offers an enterprise mail product, I think, good luck to me trying to get the clowns who just updated to Windows 2005 to do anything that innovative . . . .
ETA I just looked at my Gmail Sent folder. About 50% have a title, 50% don’t. I guess my friends and family are fairly tolerant of my keeping them in the dark about the content of incoming messages.
Also if you need to keep the e-mail for further reference it’s a PITA if there is no subject line. Imagine a folder or Gmail search result with 50 subjectless items, one of which is the sent or received message that you need to look up. Not all e-mail traffic is so emphemeral as the OP’s seems to be - I have e-mail exchanges in my work accoung reaching back to 1996 that I still need to read occasionally.
I said that and I think that I was conservative. I have over 1100 emails in my gmail in box and all of them have titles.
If you get a single false positive on Gmail, there is something wrong. The reason I switched to Gmail was the fact that this never happened.
OP: Gmail won’t even put a non-titled email in your RSS. This sucks, because I use my Gmail for receiving text messages (it costs money on my phone). Almost no one puts subjects on those.
A lot of programs warn you if you try to send an email without either a subject or a body. However, gmail also wants to organize emails into conversations (or threads) and it uses the subject to do this.