e-mail pet peeves

MY GOAL FOR THIS WEEK:

Empty my inbox. Unsubscribe to all non-work mailing lists. Clean my Eudora mailboxes, archive or trash old e-mail.

I'm still struggling with my e-mail. Though my e-mail does not come close to approaching Inkspot levels, I am still having trouble managing it. I am ashamed to admit that there are currently 2124 e-mail messages in my Inbox, and not all have even been read, and these do NOT include the automatically filtered personal and spam e-mails. Bad, bad Debbie. I have over 25MB of e-mail in my mailboxes.

My main problem is that I'm not heartless enough when it comes to trashing e-mail without answering it, and I'm also on way too many mailing lists. Because of my various online columns and carry-over from Inkspot, I still get a lot of work-related e-mails asking for advice. Not having the heart to trash them immediately or send a form letter, I keep them around with the good but misplaced intention of answering them eventually.

I also tend to keep everything (my packrat mentality, but that's a whole other Blathering). What I should really do is delete non-essential e-mail as soon as I've read it, or at least regularly archive older e-mail onto a hard disk or CDs.

My current major e-mail pet peeves:

- SPAM. This will always be at the top of my list.

- People whose signatures (long quotes, etc. at the ends of their e-mails or postings) are longer than the e-mail messages themselves.

- Blank subject headers.

- Subject headers that don't have anything to do with the message content. I'm as guilty of this as anyone, but plan to improve on this from now on.

- People who write a bunch of multiple e-mail messages in a row rather than combining all their thoughts and responses in one e-mail message at a time. Again, I'm as guilty of this as anyone. (Clarification: multiple e-mail messages on the same topic, that is)

- Being subscribed to mailing lists and notification lists without my permission.

- When responding to e-mail, people who echo the ENTIRE message in their reply, then add something contentless at the end, like "I agree" or "Thanks".

- Poorly written e-mails. I know, I know, not everyone's a writer. But it drives me nuts when I have to reread a message half a dozen times to try to interpret exactly what a person meant to say, either because of poor sentence structure or typos. I know I tend to write more sloppily when I'm tired or in a hurry, but am resolved to improve in this area as well.

- People who write e-mails to a HUGE number of people and include ALL the e-mails in the TO: or CC: fields instead of in the BCC: field. Inevitably someone's going to respond to the whole group with "please take me off the list" or something else that should be directed only to the sender.

PLEASE NOTE:

Inevitably after I post a Blathering like this, all the friends I DO enjoy corresponding with by e-mail immediately stop writing to me because they're worried about overloading my mailbox when in actuality, it's their e-mails that keep me sane. :-)

Links/News:

One year ago, Sara slept over.

Three years ago, Andy Barrie invited me to be on his CBC morning radio show.

Four years ago, I puzzled over the Furbee craze.

Five years ago, Mark Osier successfully defended his thesis.

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Today's Blatherpic:

My corporate seal. My tax lawyer has confirmed that I no longer need this, though apparently I have to hang onto my minute book for a few more years. I have given the seal to my friend Frank so that he can put a bullet hole in it at his shooting range, then give it back to me.