Top 10 Annoying Email Behaviors

By Business, Funny, General, Life

The single greatest time waster in my day is email. I cant seem to get away from enormous volumes of email. The worst part is being further annoyed by things people do when they email you. Here are my top 10 most annoying behaviors when it comes to people who email me.

10) “Consider The Environment Before You Print This Email.” Seriously? Who receives an email and then thinks, “Hey, I want to turn this digital message into a piece of snail mail by printing it.” I often want to reply back and attach a picture of me lighting the printed email on fire.

9) Re-Forwarding Already Sent Emails: When you send people information they need later (logins, passwords, files), they rarely will save it in a place for them to find easily later when they need. Instead of looking through their inbox, they send you an email to resend it to them… and then again in 2 weeks… and then again in a month…and (you get the idea).

8) Marked Urgent. It seems like every day I get a email marked urgent for a non urgent matter. Most people have abused the urgent flag to be meaningless and decreases the chances I will take the email seriously. Please mark urgent only when it truly is urgent, not because you think you are important.

7) “ASAP”: One of the more insulting inferences during email communication is the use of ASAP. Everything I do, I try and do it as soon as possible. Someone telling me ASAP implies that I will handle their request after several hours of facebook browsing.

6) Silly Salutations: What’s with the competition to make the most polite, trendy or holy salutation? Some people have “best regards” before their name, others tell you how much their like the British by signing “cheers.” The worst of all are religious salutations such as “in His grip.” I think I want to update mine to “covered in the blood of Jesus and sanctified” just to show people my signature is more holy.

5) Legal / Privacy Disclaimers: If you deal with someone in business or law, you likely have seen a novel disclaimer at the end of their email that describes the legal privileges of receiving the email. I especially enjoy these legally meaningless 2500 word essays at the bottom of emails when all the body of the email is simply, “Yes, tuesday works” or “Ok, sounds good.”

4) Asking Me To Google Something For You: Surprisingly some people don’t think google really works because they ask me the simplest questions that are found on google within 2.5 seconds. They will ask, “Do you know the phone number for that company?” or “What is the address to that place?” If I have to google it, then you have to google it.

3) Puzzle Piece Emails: Sometimes I get people who email me in real time of their thoughts. They get one thought, then hit “send.” Another thought comes, then they hit “send” again on  new email. They send me 8 or 9 emails that all have contradictions and cross references. Putting the pieces together to one coherent message takes me forever.

2) Read Receipt Requests: One of the more awkward features that got built into email programs was the “read receipt request” feature where the recipient gets a request that you read the email. I always hit no. You’ll know I read the email when I hit reply, captain obvious

1) Followup Phone Call: The single most annoying email behavior is to send me an email and then call me about it right after hitting send. They call saying, “Hey, I sent you an email… did you get it??” .I pauses and say, “Um, let me hit send / receive….oh yes, the one sent 2 minutes ago. Yep, I got it.”  The least you could do is wait a few hours!

What are the things that annoy you with email? Leave a comment below!

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