I love e-mail. It’s undoubtedly my primary means of communication at work, to the point where I feel as if I could give up my phone tomorrow and not really be impacted. Honestly, I think being able to communicate effectively via e-mail is an absolute must in pretty much ANY industry these days, including unlikely ones like carpentry and stock car racing.

And while I love to rail on business for being backwards technologically, I’d be really hard-pressed to argue that e-mail wasn’t adopted quickly enough. Because it exploded onto the scene and became incredibly pervasive very quickly.

That said, there’s a whole lot about e-mail — and, more accurately, the way people use e-mail — that drives me crazy. Having spent many of my years in the office in a mostly unofficial ‘tech support’ role (something I’m sure a lot of Gen Y workers can relate to), I’ve seen absolutely mind-bending practices from co-workers when it comes to their e-mail programs.

I think a lot of the odd behaviour stems from the fact that e-mail did come into offices so quickly. If you think about it, nobody was ever really trained on e-mail, at least not like they were trained on how to use the copier (or whatever). Habits that may have made sense for composing, sending or filing ‘real’ mail were transferred over to the electronic Inbox, despite the fact that those habits make almost no sense when dealing with electronic media.

In that light, I don’t blame anyone for adopting these bizzare practices. But I’m still going to make fun of them.

What follows is five non-sensical things people do with e-mail.

Creating hundreds of subfolders, many of which are redundant

One of the most common thing I see when troubleshooting an older person’s e-mail is the giant list of subfolders under their Inbox. Inevitably, these subfolders are based on one or both of the following criteria:

• The person who sent the messsage
• The date the message was received

So you get people who manually move all the e-mails they get in March to their “March” folder. Or all the e-mails they get from Bob to their ‘Bob’ folder. Or, and this is truly staring into a dark abyss, all the e-mails they get from Bob in March to a “Bob – March” folder.

This is CRAZY.

Some subfolder organization I can understand. Personally, I keep it simple: I have “Inbox” and I have “Old”. But I could understand folders like “Policies”, “Reports”, “Harassment Claims” or the like. But subfolders based on person and/or date are undoubtedly stupid and a HUGE waste of time for the people ‘organizing’ their e-mail.

Any e-mail program EVER automatically lets you sort by date and by person. Newer programs even let you set up Search or Smart folders that let you see those items without wasting twenty minutes every day playing a useless drag-and-drop game with Outlook 2003.

Calling to make sure you got their e-mail

I could understand this one when people were new to e-mail and still using dial-up connections. Back then, sending a 200 kilobyte message was dicey. If it was of particular importance, it made sense to call and confirm everything made it to the other end intact.

But now, over a decade later, it’s still commonplace for your phone to ring simultaneously with the e-mail hitting your inbox. And so you end up picking up your phone as you read the message, and the first question is always “Did you get my e-mail?”

I understand not trusting technology. Especially for people who were around in the Windows 95/98 era when everything pretty well sucked and attempting to send a simple two-line message to a co-worker could lead to four blue screen error messages, a bunch of crap about IRQ settings and then, weirdly, a viewing of Weezer’s video for “Buddy Holly”, but we’ve passed the threshold. Either call me or e-mail me. Don’t do both.

And don’t even get me started on ‘read receipts’. If people judged my e-mail reading habits based on my response to read receipts, they’d assume I never check my e-mail ever.

Taking spam really personally

I.T. workers will understand this one better than anyone else. The co-worker who knows that you’re “into your computers” and always wants to talk about one thing: all the spam they get. They turn their computers on in the morning and make remarks like “20 messages? Bet most of it is SPAM!” while chuckling to themselves. They read off spam subject lines and messages to no one in particular. They’re constantly on the look-out for ways to fight spam. They’re inevitably the ones who end up getting their identities stolen through phishing scams.

I hate spam too, of course. Everyone hates spam. But acting like it’s some sort of epidemic that’s landed squarely in your e-mail box is more than a little non-sensical. And also a major waste of time. The best way to ‘fight’ spam? Turn on your e-mail client’s filter. And ignore the stuff that slips through the cracks. Honestly, do you get this worked up about the junk mail flyers you get in your mailbox at home, too?

Forwarding EVERYTHING

If real life were exactly like e-mail, every time anyone said anything remotely witty in a gathering of people, all of the people in attendance would immediately contact all of their friends, known relatives, acquaintances and vague undefinable relationships and share the witty comment with them.

E-mail forwarding is an epidemic worse than spam. At least with spam there’s the chance that someone, somewhere might find it slightly useful. Some people really want cheap black-market viagra or diet pills. But nobody wants a poorly-researched treatise on how aspartame is bad for you that was written in 1996. Or an appeal to forward this message so some little orphan girl can buy shoes to be a ballerina. Because she will get $5 per forward through the transitive technological property of magic faerie computery gizmos.

If you do this, please stop.

Refusing to upgrade

People were generally willing to adopt e-mail as part of their day-to-day business, but, for a lot of people, that’s where they stopped. Try to upgrade a person still using Outlook Express 6 to a more current e-mail client and be ready for them to freak the hell out. What happened to all their FOLDERS? This address book doesn’t work the same way! All of the emoticons I had readily available through a handy toolbar are GONE!

For some reason I can’t quite fathom, people somehow got stuck in a rut, even standing on the cusp of the new internet wave. I’ve even had issues getting people to switch from pop3 to imap/exchange, despite the obvious benefits, as trying to get people to understand archiving old messages — versus keeping a phalanx of subfolders — is damn near impossible.

I’m convinced that a big reason e-mail viruses are still an issue is because of these people. Microsoft, for all their faults, has done a fairly good job locking down recent versions of Outlook to casual e-mail viruses — you can’t really get infected through the preview pane anymore, for example — but the people still deeply devoted to their OE6 install are ruining it for everyone.

Bonus: Using Comic Sans

I don’t think I need to say any more about that one.

There are lots more, of course. Things like privacy policies, having no conception of what a reasonable attachment size is, trying to do html newsletters via e-mail, using proprietary Microsoft stuff (I had someone trying to ‘recall’ a message they sent me the other day; it was weird) and using txtspeak in business e-mail all drive me just as crazy. But I think that’s enough to start with.

Generation Y, by the way, is by no means immune to any of this. In fact, in some cases we’re the worst offenders. For a supposedly ‘tech savvy’ generation, we’re often very… not. I think in a lot of cases that has to do with our education system, which still treats computers & technology like an irrelevant lark. More on that in a later post.

For now, though: what about e-mail drives you crazy?

Tags: annoyances, computers, e-mail, internet, Technology