Top 10 Email Pet Peeves

10) Bad grammer, spelling, or improper punctuation
ALL CAPS is yelling, and all lower case without punctuation is just as bad. Learn how to write and spell and press the shift key, or at minimum use the spelling and grammar checkers in Microsoft Word. Some messages are so bad, not only do they detract from the message they are trying to convey, and make the sender look bad, they can be difficult or impossible to interpret properly. Emails from grownups shouldn't include shortcuts like "LOL" (for laughing out loud), or emoticons ;->. If you don't dot your i's with smiley faces in business correspondence, you shouldn’t do the equivalent in a business-related email message.

9) Using the wrong email address
Sending personal emails to my business address or business emails to my personal address, or repeatedly using an email address I've asked them to not use, is frustrating. Mixing up their accounts is just as bad, I would hate to have to forward a budget justification to my boss sent to me from iluvjagerbombs@ao1.com. Using company email like IM to discuss (sometimes very) personal issues is work email abuse and is inappropriate. Don’t send me racist, sexist, off-color, explicit, or flat-out pornographic crap emails. I don't want to receive Goatse at any time, but I especially don’t want my name showing up in company logs of porn-abusers (most big companies monitor email).

8) Pictures of your cat
Or your dog dressed up for Halloween, or Easter, or whatever. I may not even want to see pictures of your wife or kids if they’re cute, unless I ask, or you are a close friend of mine. If I want to see that stuff, I’ll go to Cute Overload™. I’m just not interested in cuteness. And if you do send me that crap stuff, have the courtesy to put the pictures on the web and just send a link, that way I can go see them if I’d like to. And resize the pictures, don’t send me an email with a dozen megabyte attachments. Also, don’t send me Internet petitions, unless you’re sure I feel the same way. Plus they’re worthless anyway.

7) Ridiculously shifting work
Don’t try to solve complex issues using email. If an email has gone back and forth more than once, just pick up the phone! Don’t wait until the last minute to ask me to do something as if I had nothing else to do. This may have been an urgent issue for months, and sending me an email message marked it urgent does not make it my responsibility. And I hate people who copy my supervisor to try to blackmail me into doing something that isn’t my job. If it’s my job, I’ll do it. If it’s not my job, ask nice and I’ll do it if I can. If you copy my boss, that’s threatening me, and what I usually do is walk over to my boss’s office and tell him what an ass unhelpful person you are. No paper trail on that, either. And then I’ll ask him to respond to you. Most bosses are jealous of their people’s time and don’t like this tactic, either.

6) Copying the wrong people
Stop replying to everyone if everyone does not have a need to know. Not everyone cares that you agree with the original email. Last week I received an email that said only "Has anyone seen Joe XXX?" And then I received a half-dozen reply-all "No, I haven't seen him." One-liners like "Thanks," "Me too", and "I agree" are usually not necessary, and if they are necessary to be polite, it is not necessary to copy everyone, only the intended recipient of the politesse. I send an email message to 25 people, and 15 of them reply to everyone with a one-liner. This is just as bad as spam. Today I received an email that said only "I need have the Executive Projector ASAP - please return to Lee Ann XXX on 33". This was sent to everyone in the entire company! Aargggghhh! If you’re sending a message to a group because you’re too lazy to select the appropriate recipients, stop. In Outlook, you can expand distribution lists into individual members, and then delete out the individuals that don't need to receive the email. I especially hate getting forwarded back an email I originally sent out, because I'm a member of someone's distribution list and they're too lazy to take me off, especially if it had a large attachment. What a bunch of crap waste of time and bandwidth.

5) Read receipt
You’re checking to see if I opened your message. It’s a waste of time doing this because I have this feature turned off in my email program, it lets me know when someone has requested a read receipt, and asks me if I want to send it. I usually say no. If they have read receipt turned on automatically on every email they send, then I start deleting their emails unread (they get a message saying so) and then un-deleting, reading, and filing the email like I normally would. If they ask me about it, I deny that I deleted it unread, and prove that I have the email. Pretty funny. However, at my new job, we’re a Lotus Notes shop, and that advanced piece of crap software does not contain that feature.

4) No response
You send a nice email message to someone to request information. The message clearly expects a response, but nothing happens. If you’re too busy to hit Reply to say “No,” you need to examine how you’re working. Why did you make me waste your time and mine? If you’re not the right person, let me know, so I can find the right person. If you don’t have the information, let me know, so I can look elsewhere. If you don’t have time, let me know, so I can either wait until you have time, or ask someone else. But if you don’t respond, you’re just going to get the request again until you make some form of response.

3) Not including history
This is especially bad with AOL newbies, hitting the reply-all (or even worse, forward) and not including the previous threads. I’ve received many emails from AOL’ers that just say “Very funny”. Not so funny.

2) __________________
Get it? I left the subject line blank. Subject lines are helpful in giving you an idea of the context of the following text. Always use a subject line, and if you are forwarding or responding to an email and the subject line isn’t pertinent or informative, change it. It’s really very easy. Don’t send emails with blank subject lines. Don’t pull up a two-month old message from me, hit Reply, and send me a new message that has nothing to do with the previous one, just so you don’t have to type my name in the address bar. And I generally don’t like emails that only contain the subject line.

1) Signing me up for spammers
Don’t sign me up for free movie tickets or register me for sweepstakes or sign me up for a joke-of-the-day email or other crap stuff like that, those are just ways that spammers use to get email addresses from gullible people who turn in all their (smarter) friends who would never sign up for spam. Don’t send me chain letters or hoaxes, you better check them out first. Because I will check them out, usually on Snopes, and if it’s a hoax I’ll tell all your friends what a gullible person you are. See my article on How to Avoid Spam.