It’s 2008 and email is still broken

I’ve said it before in 2004 and 2006: email is bro­ken. It’s a great rant topic for my 1200th blog post.

The cred­i­bil­ity of email as a mar­ket­ing medium was destroyed years ago by UCE (unso­licited com­mer­cial email or spam). Man­agers helped destroy email as a busi­ness tool shortly afterwards.

Stu­dents often treat email as a casual mes­sag­ing tool, when col­lege is a great oppor­tu­nity to learn how to use email in an effec­tive and pro­fes­sional man­ner. Every email user can learn to write bet­ter messages.

Help me read your email

It really helps me if the sub­ject fields are mean­ing­ful. I get hun­dreds of email mes­sages every day.

Tell me what class you’re tak­ing. I don’t carry my class ros­ter with me 24/7. I’ve had stu­dents email me ques­tions about their assign­ment with­out ever men­tion­ing which course they are tak­ing. It’s more of a prob­lem at the start of the term. After the first 2 or 3 weeks, I’ll remem­ber which stu­dents are in which course.

Do you need an answer to a ques­tion? Then sum­ma­rize the ques­tion in the sub­ject line. If it’s an easy ques­tion, I can send a quick reply with my answer. If an answer will take me more time, I’ll send a reply say­ing so.

Are you ask­ing me to do some­thing for you on a dead­line? Put the date in the sub­ject line.

No fancy email

Email is a great tool for writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tion, as long as the mes­sage is writ­ten in plain­text. When I get HTML-formatted email that has pretty back­grounds and fancy fonts — assum­ing that the mes­sage made it past my servers’ spam block­ers — my reply is almost always in plaintext.

HTML is for web pages, not mail mes­sages. The writer’s color choices might look nice to them, but these col­ors might ren­der the email unread­able to a color-blind recipient.

It’s far too easy to hide web bugs and bogus code in an HTML-formatted email mes­sage. Some mobile email clients like Gmail will strip the HTML for­mat­ting before dis­play­ing the message.

I hate “reply all”

I often receive email mes­sages from other fac­ulty mem­bers, and the cc: and to: fields are lit­tered with addresses. I love my col­leagues, but some of them never really learned how to use the Inter­net or email.

Some email servers block mes­sages with large num­bers of out­bound email addresses, as a cour­tesy to the poten­tial recip­i­ents. If one of the recip­i­ents presses the “reply all” but­ton, their mes­sage gets sent to the entire list. It gets annoy­ing when their reply is some­thing innocu­ous like “OK” or “I’ll be there”.

Get with the program

Most peo­ple who are send­ing one email mes­sage to more than 20 peo­ple should con­sider post­ing the con­tent to a web page, an intranet, or an RSS feed.

Granted, I do use the mass email func­tion in TurnItIn.com to remind stu­dents about assign­ment dead­lines, or to announce a new assign­ment. I almost always make these announce­ments on billso.com, but expe­ri­ence has taught me that some stu­dents can­not access the web site on a reg­u­lar basis.

I’m could go off on a rant, but most of my stu­dents do use email effec­tively. These arti­cles from about.com and Microsoft have some great tips for those who are interested.

Tagged as: email, faculty, intranet, marketing, rss, social, spam, student, usability