Corporate Email Etiquette - Dead or Alive? 504
mbravo writes "I work in a largish company, heavily into IT, and in a complex and quickly changing market. Employees are predominantly in the 30 or younger age-bracket, and as you might expect we rely on a lot of internal e-mail. Despite that, lately I'm finding myself increasingly frustrated by a complete lack of e-mail etiquette in the company. A typical thread might look like a hundred-message-long chain of one-line replies, with full quoting and hundreds of recipients in the 'To:' field. It feels like it is happening more and more often. I don't seem to be seeing much success in explaining to my co-workers what the problem is here. How do you deal with this at your place of business, and does your company care? Does the company take any policing or educating measures?"
Re:My experience (Score:5, Informative)
Re:With gmail (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Different tool (Score:5, Informative)
Re:With gmail (Score:3, Informative)
That's a feature that most of have always taken for granted. Long-time Windows users, on the other hand, will no doubt consider such a feature as novel, given that historically, Outlook and Outlook express were incapable of such an ordinary function, and their users had probably never seen a threaded message list of email or newsgroup postings.
Maybe some current Outlook users or Exchange admins can chime in here, but it appears that Microsoft has, instead of making use of the `Message-Id` field, introduced a `Thread-Index` field (populated with an absurdly long number) to make up for things. It would be funny if it wasn't so absurd.
Either way, it seems many folks remain unaware of the concept of threading. I can't fathom how they slog through their email, but it's a common enough occurence on email lists to see people send a new message on a new topic by hitting their Reply button instead of bothering to type an email address. Unknown to them, the new message with its new subject line gets buried in an unrelated thread.
As a side note, the more recent versions of mutt can "break" or "join" threads. A welcome feature to add to all the other features to compensate for people using borked email clients, misconfigured servers, or a reliance on a poorly-written web applications to send their emails to the world.
Re:i don't get it .... it's wasting people's time (Score:3, Informative)
Consider an average prole on (say) $30/hour. If they get 10 of these dumb emails a day, each of 200 lines it will take a few minutes to read each one. Call it about 30 minutes per day or $15. If just one person responds to each of the 100 people on the email, that takes each of those 100 people another 1 minutes to read the new stuff = 100 minutes = $50 per responder, per email.
If 10 people respond to 10 emails a day (all sent to 100 people), that's $5k/day of wasted people time
Re:Part of the problem (Score:3, Informative)
I'd suggest the second should be characterised as "written, edited and formatted for the benefit of the recipient rather than the convenience of the sender". A fairly popular signature that reflects one aspect of the obviousness of this is the following:
A: Yes.
Q: Are you sure?
A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
Q: Why is top posting annoying in email?
Ironically, many who do take the trouble to format their message properly neglect to take the additional small step of removing extranous cruft. I can't count the number of times I've seen the above quoted in an email, let alone all the other variations of salutations, signatures, and disclaimers.
Part of the solution (Score:3, Informative)
In other words, "Outlook style" is the problem. Outlook QuoteFix [in.tum.de] is the solution.
Re:Get gmail (Score:4, Informative)
TFA was about internal corporate email, not about personal email.
Re:E-mail Conversations (Score:3, Informative)
The only times I've resorted to that were when I was being stonewalled by a coworker and I wanted my boss to see all the excuses I was forced to deal with.
Re:My experience (Score:2, Informative)
I think that email is definitely not suitable for
- task management
- planning
- storage
- version control
- communication within a large group
- instant messaging
A lot of people try to misuse email for things it's not suitable. Proper tools can make things a lot easier and offer features which email can't offer, ever.- A proper task management software works much better for task related communication (and you get to use the management features at the same time)
- Version control systems are a much better place for storing updated documents
- Like stated in many replies, GMail conversations >>> email reply chains
- Sometimes instant messaging is better than emails
- Personal meetings are usually better for planning
- Wiki for documentation
...
At the moment the popular applications still seem a little immature because there isn't enough integration between them. Users have to manually move information from application to application which makes life difficult. For example, how many document editors come with an easy to use integrated version control system support?Re:Different tool (Score:3, Informative)
SOX is only in reference to financial statement or items that may impact your financial statement. You can either have policy against using IM for any financial conversations, or a trigger system that detects communication that may be related to financials, which then logs the relevant portion of the conversation, but most companies don't even do that because of states like Washington that requires both parties have to agree to have a conversation recorded.
However, large companies will also put in replacement IM servers that keep all communication internal unless you are in a conversation with someone outside the company. That just makes logical sense, why have all those conversations going over the Internet if you don't have to? IMLogic is a nice tool, but Symantec picked them up in their buying frenzy... so we'll see how long they stay a solid product.