I wanted to have a rant about emails at work the other day but didn't quite get to it. I've managed to work myself up into a ranting frenzy now, so I'll put it below a more link as it's quite long.

One of the things I find really odd is the emailing system at work. I got used to emails through Pine at uni, which is basic but does the job. And I used it at home for a few years after too, I got used to it and I liked it. Mostly because Outlook Express doesn't give you the option of being able to reply below, as is logical to me, but then dad found a program that does and I'm not much happier and loving Outlook Express. I do miss being able to do everything without touching the mouse, though. But anyway.

There is, obviously really, a limit to the number of emails people can store otherwise the network will run out of space. And yet nearly everyone writes Rich Text or HTML emails, which I would have thought would take up more space than Plain Text - even if not very much it would be sure to have a cumulative effect. The reason I'm glad I saved this post for today is because they've changed the signature we have to use for emails to clients (although most people have that sig set to default) so it has the company logo in. Fortunately I rarely send emails to clients and half that time I forget to use the long signature (my default sig has my name, purely in so I don't have to type a grand total of three letters and press return a couple of times).

The other trouble I have is that a lot of people don't seem to know how to use emails properly. By which I mean, readable. I mean, I just can't read light blue Comic Sans at size 18. Or brown text on a pink background. Normally I don't notice this sort of thing because I have a program on my computer at work that shows all emails in plain text in the preview window. It's because I haven't been able to use my computer since April that this is really doing my head in. I did discover that you can convert received emails to plain text, but only if they're rich text, and people have just been told they have to send HTML emails to fit the logo in.

And then there's the problem of replying. I'm just getting to grips with this replying above thing and I can actually see its use. Except that people just reply and reply and reply and I don't realise until I've printed out what I think is a one page email to find it's actually four pages long and half blue. This is also because people reply to old emails, sometimes changing the header, sometimes not, and consequently is just odd.

There are times when the only way it makes sense is to reply below, in bits. The standard everywhere is to put > symbols at the beginnings of quoted lines (or rather, to tell the email program to do it). It's really hard to work out who's said what when it all looks the same. Sometimes I get replies on a new line but not always. A blank line in between seems to be asking a bit much. I also learnt that replies in caps really does feel like being shouted at.

I want to talk about email headers as well, as I've brought them up. The header is meant to be able to help me make a decision about whether I need to read the email now or whether it will wait, or whether I want to avoid it for as long as possible in case someone has read receipts turned on. And so I can find things easily later, once I've filed them. So no header at all is no help. As is no content but a header so long I can't read it without opening the email itself, thereby saving no time at all. The bizarre thing comes when people reply to an old email and don't change the subject and sometimes it isn't even vaguely about the same thing. Clicking on New (or Control-N) and typing a few letters of the name isn't that much harder, surely?

What really puzzles me is that Outlook is supposed to do so much more than Outlook Express. So why is it that Outlook Express has an option to view all emails as Plain Text but Outlook doesn't? How does that make sense? Oh, hang on, these are Microsoft products, I forgot.

I did think about passwording this post in case people from work are reading (my website address is on their website after all, even though it's not linked, so really annoying from my stats point of view). But then I remembered we all have the right to criticise in this country. I have no delusions at all that if I brought this stuff up (sensibly and not as a rant!) bugger all would get changed and I would have to like it or lump it. At the moment I very mucy lump it but I am entitled to my opinion all the same.

2 Responses to “An emailing rant”

Fuzz Says:
Monday 31st July 2006 at 8:08 pm

I am really annoyed about people abusing e-mails. I dislike fancy HTML e-mails but I positively hate huge attachments. E-mail is not designed to send 50MB powerpoint presentations, it is designed for small plain text files. Large files are particularly stupid at work because we have very small mailboxes, so they are just killing their mailbox and mine sending those files. Mer.

Nic Says:
Monday 31st July 2006 at 8:36 pm

That's a good point. People at work (me included) have got into the habit of sending people files instead of pointing them to them, which would take up less space and be more useful. But it's slightly more work!

Unfortunately we tend to need to send and receive large attachments of data and Powerpoint presentations, which does tend to make it creak and fall over.