Ask HN: email pet peeves? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: email pet peeves?

4 pointsforkandwait9 comments

My pet peeve is people who don't close the email conversation, especially when it regards plans that each side has to agree on. For example, we go back and forth about dinner or whatever, then I send you an email that says "cool, see you at six, bye" then you say "yep, see you then. bye".

On the other hand, I top quote a lot...

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I hate when I ask 2 - 3 questions in an email, and I only get the last one answered.

To combat this, I number my questions, and it seems to be easier for the reader to remember and respond to. I also keep it under 5. like:

I have 4 questions:

(1)

(2)

...

In organizations where top-posting is the norm, this also makes it easier for the other person to identify which question they're answering.

I can't stand when people try to collaborate on some document via a huge thread where everyone attaches their own version to their message. Woe be it to the poor soul responsible for merging 5 peoples' parallel edits.

We have source control, wikis, and Google Docs for a reason.

I dislike when people arbitrarily change the subject line every other reply because it screws with gmail's conversations.

This wouldn't be as bad if gmail let you MERGE conversations as you wished.

Does gmail not use the In-Reply-To or References headers? Or is its use of them just brittle?

(While googling for the names of these headers, I came across http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html , which is an excellent guide to the difficulties of implementing threading in MUAs.)

I have no idea, but I've noticed that people messing with the subject line screws up conversations. My mother does this a lot.

I despise emails that are written like chapter books. I stop reading after the 2nd or 3rd paragraph. If it's that important then you should have called.

I only write e-mails like chapter books when people write e-mails with 20 questions.

I don't mind length as much as I mind lack of organization, clarity, and/or conciseness. So many people just write e-mails as a stream of consciousness, though.

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