This installment of PS@E concerns the use of ordered list. When I write an email containing multiple questions or comments on a general topic, I find that it can be useful to track each separate point with an order list. By doing this the recipient has an easy way to refer back to specific points in the body of my email, it beats inline replies and awkward sentences that start with “Re: XYZ” or “When you said Acme…” I also find that writing in point form has the side effect of helping me keep my emails short and sweet.

Of course, this system is completely useless if the recipient doesn’t honour the list items.

The subject of the email should reflect the topic of the body. When replying to an email thread, you should only reply with content relevant to the main topic. Do not ask an unrelated question, or start writing about what you had for lunch.

If you have a new topic, compose a new email!

It may not be entirely obvious why this sucks, I’m going to go into a little more detail than usual. This sucks because it makes it impossible to reference the email in the future. When I do a search for something, I usually ignore subjects that don’t pertain to my search. If I give the thread a label based on the content, when I reference the label in the future I will probably think it has been incorrectly labeled. It also makes it more difficult to resolve the email thread. It is also more likely to spin out of control, especially if there are a lot of CC’er in on the thread (see: PS@E IV).

Lay off that reply-all button.

1. Not descriptive enough. Tell me what the email is about, I need to know whether to read it, file it or delete it without reading the body.
2. Too long. I need to be able to read the subject on my mobile device and gmail cuts subjects after about 12 words. Gmail is just being generous though, 12 words is far too long. I’d suggest less than 6.
3. Too short. One word is not (usually) going to be descriptive enough.
4. Full of “Re:” and/or “Fwd:” more than one of either is too much, they waste valuable character real estate.

As a rule of thumb, try to use 3 – 6 descriptive words. An extra word or two -  surrounded by separator like a pair of braces – for a tag is also acceptable if you need that for your GTD filters.

I’m not entirely sure why the feedback was so contradictory, or what to make of it. I think it says something about twitter, I’m just not sure what that is.

When you add recipients to the “CC” list you expose all recipients email addresses to everyone else on the list. By doing this you have inadvertently sent your entire client list to all of your clients.

In the future please use BCC.
For more information, see wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_copy#E-mail

Please assume that I construct every email with care.
That’s all.

My I direct your attention to Part I: Yes I Got Your Email!

If you’ve ever tried to delete more than 20 contacts in gmail, you might have noticed an error message informing you that you’re only allowed to delete 20 contacts at a time.

I don’t really think of Google as a company that puts abitrary limits on features. Who knows why they decided upon this limit.

Suppose you’ve accidentally quadrupled your contacts list in some sort of import mishap and you just want to start over. There’s a fairly simple – if somewhat non-intuitive – workaround for this. Click the “older version” link it the top navigation bar (http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1). This will allow you access to the old contacts list interface.
From there:
1) click “all contacts” tab
2) scroll down to the bottom, select “all” (no idea why this option is not at the top of the interface)
3) Delete!

Of course I got your email!
Whether I’ve read it is another question.