Walter Alejandro Iglesias <wai@roquesor.com>
Very annoying practices you shold avoid with electronic mail
- Using formatted text (eg HTML.) Or the irritating flowed format to allow plain text automatically adjust to the window size, imitating HTML behaviour. Among other important reasons the main is these formats break quoted text.
- Doing top-posting, specially with email clients not able to quote (eg Outlook) letting original messages accumulate at the bottom as garbage on each response.
- Appending noisy legal notes (won't protect your message neither at the practical nor at the legal level.)
- Relying on email as a tool to send files (instead of a server,) abusing of attachments.
- Not reading before answering, forcing the other to explain the same idea again and again through a twelve messages thread when the first was enough. Or using software purposely designed to obstruct or even break the dialog as the one pointed in the following item.
- Using annoying ticket systems, as large companies use today as part of their bureaucracy to discourage their clients from asking questions or support.
- Forcing the user to suffer web forms to send messages, as those for contact in web sites o those used by the mentioned ticket systems. All fake privacy measures.
- Using web mail interfaces (gmail, hotmail,) limited by design.
- Write and answer email messages from a smartphone. As happens with any “Swiss army knife” it has sense only under those special circumstances in which you don't have access to a real tool. (And NO, chat tools like the currently famous and widely used are not a replacement for email.)
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