The 7 habits of highly annoying emailers

I came across this insightful article by Dudley B. Dawson

Below are seven habits that consistently appear at offices across the world. If you have additional examples, please feel free to provide them in the comments below.

1. Including email signatures that include credentials like “MBA” or “HRMS” after their name. Existing readers are well aware of the distaste for credentials in email signatures as described in “Email Signatures: Adding “MBA” after your name is very telling“. [Note – I disagree in principle with this, but will leave that for another blog post – this article is about Dudley’s list, not mine.]

2. Adding clipart to your email. Often the work of administrative assistants, human resources, or other corporate cheerleaders. To think that when these people attach the clipart they imagine recipients smiling. This is called reputation distortion. Those who think others believe them to be a cheery person are actually the people most despised by the office. Clipart photos are to corporate cheerleaders as rainbows are to the GLBT.  Immediate and universal identification.

3. Excessive use of smiley faces and exclamation points or other repetitive punctuation?!!!? The culprit is usually a young female.  At some point from 1987 on through 2000, elementary schools taught young girls the art of expressing themselves through massive amounts of punctuation.  One exclamation point means you’re just a little excited. Five exclamation points is absolute elation. These people spend the better part of their life behind three question marks.  Side note: If email contained a way to replace the dot on a lowercase “i” with a heart, these people would eat it up like their flashy emoticons.

4. Including a vcard attachment in your email. Receiving a vCard attachment is the equivalent to someone playing “The only thing that looks good on me is you” by Bryan Adams in 2009.  It sucked in 1996 and quite frankly it’s amazing it still exists in 2009.

5. Religious usage of ‘high importance’ or ‘read receipt’ functionality. Perhaps the worst of all habits of annoying emailers, the consistent and unnecessary usage of high importance emails is a huge problem among project management types.  Eventually the office becomes numb to any sort of elevated importance and the purpose of elevating an email’s importance is lost organization-wide. The next time you receive an unnecessary ‘high importance’ email, respond back to them with this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf. On a slightly less annoying but more big brotherish level, the read receipt is a virtual slap in the face. If you cannot trust that someone will read your email you might as well pack up your things and get a new job, because you have issues that go far deeper than any coworker can solve.

6. Sending large attachments instead of using shared server or at least zipping the file. The technotarded crowd has a very difficult time understanding the concept of providing a link to a shared file.  In the eyes of a technotard, email is just like snail mail.  If they were to show you a document, the document needs to be physically present in the snail mail.  It cannot simply refer you to the place where the document exists.  Even worse, the technotard is completely unaware of what “zipping” a file means.  To the technotard, WinZip, or even the now built-in functionality of compressing files is something in which you should rely on IT professionals.

7. treatng email like txt mssg and end sbjct line w/ eom. Most often done by young professionals who somehow found a way to turn email subject lines into Twitter. Even more annoying is ending a message with “eom” or “end of message” as if to suggest that in the future they may send you multiple emails which are completely encapsulated in the limited space of a subject line. Perhaps even more disturbing are the 30-50 year old employees who believe it’s “the next big thing” and start sending subject-only emails to make sure they don’t fall behind the curve.