Net Etiquette 2: Blank Subject Lines

You’ll find the introduction to this series of posts at the top of my first post on net etiquette.

Here is my second plea. Please type a subject when you send an e-mail.

I get a number of e-mails every week that have no subject. I don’t know how many e-mails I get per week – but it’s over 100. I’m not unusual in that regard. If, two weeks later, I want to find an e-mail so that I can reply to it, or look something up, I need to scan down a long list to find it. I’m unlikely to succeed if the one I’m searching for just appears as a blank line.

I suppose a corollary to that is that e-mail subjects should not be too vague (“E-mail from James”), nor the whole e-mail, but a useful one-line summary of what the e-mail concerns.

Another corollary is that you don’t need to put “Re: “ at the start of your subject. I know that “Re: “ is shorthand for “regarding the subject of…”, and so “Re: Saturday morning’s meeting” is a logical enough subject for an e-mail. The trouble is that “Re: “ is redundant – an e-mail that has as its subject “Saturday morning’s meeting” must be “regarding Saturday morning’s meeting”, that’s why “Saturday morning’s meeting” is in the subject line.

That redundancy wouldn’t matter, were it not for the fact that subjects starting “Re: “ and “Fwd: “ are a matter of convention. An e-mail with a subject of “Re: XXX” is a reply to a previous e-mail which had “XXX” as it’s subject, and an e-mail with a subject of “Fwd: XXX” is an e-mail which had “XXX” as its subject forwarded to a fresh reader. So if you start your brand new e-mail “Re: “, the reader will think that it is a reply to an e-mail they had sent previously. Which also makes it hard to find the e-mail when scanning down a long list.

Just another small plea!