Emergency! Just Kidding

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

I just received a forwarded email from my team lead. She didn't know if I was on the original mailing list (which I was not), so she decided to pass it along. I include it here verbatim with only the relevant names removed to protect the innocent:

From: ******, ******
Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2004 9:04 AM
To: ************
Subject: IMPORTANT INFO
Importance: High

Happy Holidays!

It has been decided by Management that the week of 12/27 will be comfort casual.

Look... I'm all for comfort casual... but a High Importance email with a subject line in all caps? When I first saw that email from her in my inbox, I thought... Oh My God! What's gone wrong?! I talked about this a while ago, and it's worth repeating. If you over use the little ! button in Outlook nobody will pay attention to it any more. Also... most people perceive all caps as the email equivalent to yelling. Use cautiously.

Posted at 10:55 AM by Nick | | |

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Comments:

If you're using Outlook, you can set up a rule. For other email programs, there's probably something equivalent.
Whever a message arrives that is marked as high importance (aka !), permanently delete it.
You'll probably lose 1 email a year that you'll wish you hadn't.
Alternatively, just put them in a separate folder to look at when you're bored. Screening of this folder should take no more than 1 minute a week.

Posted at December 23, 2004 12:07 PM by

Anonymous