In my experience, yes, you are. Very, very rarely do I ever send an email without a subject line. Hell, it’s much more likely that I send a quick subject-only email to give someone a heads-up about something or send myself a reminder.
When I can’t think of one, I’ll just start my first sentence in the subject line. The idea of leaving it blank seems that weird.
Okay, so must of you send/receive e-mails with subject lines, but apparently this isn’t the case for Huerta. So in answer to why gmail is so “concerned” with your subject lines, I’ll go with whoever up-thread said it’s because most people *want *to enter a subject line, and they figure you’re making a mistake when you attempt to send an e-mail without one.
I also think Gmail depends a lot on subject lines when gather emails into a “conversation.” Haven’t noticed anything too weird with subjectless emails but perhaps that makes it harder to tell which emails belong together.
Speaking as a Network Guy, we automatically quarrantine all e-mails with no title. Why? Because 99.9% of title-less e-mails are spam. We’ll let our external e-mail filters deal with them. We’d rather have your intended recipient bitch at you that your e-mails are ALWAYS being delayed than have your intended recipient get the thousand or so subject-less spams that would be let through.
Give it up. Type in a simple title. It’ll make things better for you.
We are borg…
I often send emails with no message, particularly links that I think will interest people I know. Gmail asks me do I want to send the email without text in the body. Is this for similar reasons - spam filters, because as far as I am aware they are received. I get reponses when appropriate.
On preview I see that Shot From Guns does similar things to me.
I hardly ever send emails at all.
And I hardly ever read the ones I do get.
But when I send one, it has a subject line.
I am having a very hard time believing that or anything close to that. I just went through the first 350 e-mails in my Gmail spam folder and EVERY one of them – I mean, every – has some stupid title or another. I know you didn’t exactly say “99.9% of e-mails without a title are spam,” but based on what you did say, I would expect to find at least a substantial proportion of ones that were spam and had no title. Also, the spammers are clever enough in their own stupid way. Am I really supposed to believe that they haven’t figured out a workaround for such a simple rule? They’ve figured out much more elaborate workarounds . . . .
ETA I will, nonetheless, start trying to use more subject lines, based on some of the useful comments herein. Just didn’t believe the above statistic could be true.
Sure, I’ll be happy to expand on that. One of the ways that spammers gather e-mail addresses is the bulk send attack. When an e-mail is sent to an e-mail server, if the address is sent to someone that doesn’t exist, the e-mail is usually bounced back to the sender saying something like “the user does not exist”. The spammers generate e-mails in sequential format, i.e. a@site.com, aa@site.com, aaa@site.com, etc. Spammers usually don’t include subjects, or sometimes even that much text in the e-mail at all. The smaller the e-mail, the quicker the message gets back, and the quicker they can find addresses that DO work. i.e. if they see that they got bounce-back mails from aaa@site.com, aab@site.com, and aad@site.com, they know that the e-mail for aac@site.com is a legal address, which will accept their spam and that e-mail can then be put on a marketed list of valid addresses.
The above is how spam will find its way to your in-box, without you EVER giving your e-mail address out to anyone.
And FYI - the commonly accepted statistic is that 94% of ALL E-MAIL sent is spam.