How to Lose Friends and Alienate People With Email - Pt. 1

Email can be the source of aggravation in the receivers.  By following these rules, you can make them mad enough to choke you:

• Ramble when you write – Put as many subjects into your email as possible.  Try to make one email handle a month’s worth of information.  On the other hand, your email doesn’t have to have a subject at all.  Others will just love to hear you go on and on about anything!  Length is important as well.  The longer the better!  Think of it as a filibuster.
• Use an inappropriate subject line – Your subject line should have nothing to do with your topic.  It’s even more fun to come close to the topic with your subject line.  That way your recipient will wonder for hours what they are missing in the email.  This is always fun.
• Use all caps – Harder to read, caps, especially in a long email, will drum up business for LensCrafters.  They will also add to that nice spider web of wrinkles around your recipient's eyes as they try to read them.  It will give them that nice leathery look.
• use no caps – or punctuation orgrammarorcorrectspacing everyone has fun trying to figure out what you wrote
• CC everyone you can imagine, especially their superior – This is especially good when your recipient has slipped up and made a mistake.  If the mistake is small, do this before you have all the information so it looks a lot bigger than it really is.  This is also effective when dealing with confidential or sensitive information.
• Use a lot of sarcasm and off-beat humor in your email – It is hard to tell the difference between humor/sarcasm and sincerity without the facial expressions, body language, and tone.  So yuk it up.  This works especially well with people with whom you have little personal contact or who are extremely sensitive.
• Use email to deliver bad news – It gets you out of that uncomfortable face-to-face situation when you have to give someone bad news.  Who wants to hear all that crying anyway?
• Send a flame message quickly – When letting someone have it, send your flame fast.  Get it there while the feelings are still hot.  You might not want to send it tomorrow.
• Have a long signature line – The longer the better.  Ten to fifteen lines would be right in this case.  Use it to publicize your uncle’s life insurance agency or to tell every one about your grandmother’s real estate company.  Think of it as a billboard.  You might even be able to sell advertising space in your email signature if you send enough.
• Send many attachments – This helps make your email so big it will take a long time to download it.  Photos are good, as are links to web sites that you’ve visited where your computer acted strangely afterward.  As a bonus, you just might sneak in a virus you didn’t know you picked up.  On a related topic…
• Don’t tell the recipient why you’re sending the attachments – This is even sweeter when the attachments have strange names that give no clue as to what they are.  Big fun!
• Send “action or else” messages – State that if you don’t hear from them by a particular date, you’ll take some specific action (preferably one that they would not want taken).  Then, send the email late.
• Use plenty of acronyms and buzzwords – LOL, BRB, LMAO, ROFL will keep your recipient amused.
• Send repeated corrections – Send an email and then, hours later, send a correction.  Change some of the email — better yet, change a lot of it — or add an attachment (see above).  Do this repeatedly, at least 4 – 5 times.
• Use the “Urgent” flag often – Hey, it’s urgent to you, isn’t it?
• Request receipts on every email – It says you care.  It also says, “I’m getting proof that you got this, you lying bastard.”
• Forward messages but don’t say why you did – The fun is in the guessing, right?
• Don’t consider the recipient – Your boss will love that informal way you have of saying things.
• Write your email to one person and send it to someone else – This works great when you are talking about the person you sent it to.  You write to Tim about what a bastard John is.  Then, send it to John.

Use these tips and you will learn one-half of how to frustrate your friends and annoy your enemies.  Tomorrow, the other side of emails.

Disclaimer

The above email mistakes are common and are committed by everyone from time to time.  Protect your credibility by avoiding them at all costs.  Anyone who uses them intentionally pretty well deserves what they get.

Go to Part 2 and Part 3

Comments

[Phil Gerbyshak]

As an IT manager, I know plenty of people who use all of these things...often at the same time. Thanks for the cheeky post. I can't wait for part 2!

[Scott Palmer]

Or you could tell them you're going to send an attachment and just not attach it. That's always a thriller.

[Bert]

That is a good one...let's all add it to our lists! What else do you all have?

[Don]

One pet peeve my IT group have with the rest of our company is people sending everything as MS Word attachments. Things like screenshots or other pictures are first pasted into an otherwise blank .doc file and then attached to an email. Similarly for memos that could otherwise just be TYPED AS AN EMAIL are typed as word docs and then attached to an email sent company-wide. MIS people *love* that.

[DG]

How about those important 'All Staff' emails:

I left a blue coffee mug in the kitchen but now it's gone. Has anyone seen it?

Thrilling.

[Rana]

Haha, yes. Although my best example of the worst offender is me, sadly. I was participating in a department wide discussion that wandered off topic when I wrote my record worst missive: I used too casual language, inserted some sarcasm for good measure, brought up a sensitive topic and followed it up with two more messages of backpedalling before finally shutting up. I delivered two personal apologies that day and was thankful I got away with only a sternly worded email from the VP.

That was a lesson I will not soon forget.

[bodnotbod]

I sort of got used to not using email in anything other than a casual capacity from home.

Then eventually I sent one from home that was to someone at the BBC which might have led to some kind of monetary relationship.

Unfortunately I decided to write to him as if he were one of my 'online friends' with a huge amount of "sarcasm and off-beat humour" contained within.

Cue highly irate and incredibly non-humorous response.

In my defence the nascent relationship was one of "budding comedy script writer" to "professional comedy script editor".

I won't make that mistake again. Or, at least that's what I tell myself.

[Gary]

The best way to get OFF of your friends/relatives e-mail buddies list is to reply to every note they send with a link back to the Snopes.com story be-bunking the idiotic message they sent in the first place. I did this to my crazy Aunt in Dallas twice and she dropped me from her buddies list quick!

[ken]

Gary's suggestion is a good one, but not fool-proof. I snopes my dad all the time. He always replies with an "oops," but keeps the flow of glurge coming.

[firq krumpl]

my personal favorite is when i receive a reply like this:

that was cool!!!

or

what do you mean by that?

or

i totally agree/disagree!

all, of course, with no reference to the content of my email.

[Me]

firq krumpl, I totally agree.

[Sean]

wow, that made me laugh so hard... I must forward it to everyone in my address book!

[Jeff]

Etiquette goes both ways. If I receive an email from someone, I let them know I got it. If I don't have a lot of time, I just say "thanks, get back to you later". I'm also up front about the junk my friends and family send me. If I don't like it, or it's becoming a pain, I tell them "I'm spread thin these days... I may not get back to you because I have to separate these emails from more important stuff." When your main mode of communication is email, and someone emails you and you ignore them for days and days, it basically says to that person "I really don't care about you, you are nothing to me". I think that's just bad etiquette. And it's disrespectful in this day and age. I get email from people I don't particularly love but I never ignore them for days. You wouldn't just not answer someone if they called you on the phone, or spoke to you in person. Email is becoming just as ubiquitous. If you're too busy to even say "thanks, get back to you later", then perhaps you need to slow down in general. ;)

[Cara Fletcher]

I haven't thought of this way to allienate people from me but this is a good decision if you totally don't like the person.Maybe I'll use it some day.