Email Netiquette

It's been a long time since I've written anything snail mail, and even longer since I've handwritten letters. The inconvenience factor was too much. You'd sit down, obligated to write a few pages because a paragraph wasn't worth the effort, get a stamp, and envelope, and drop it in a mailbox. Email made all this so much easier, especially if you sit in front of a computer all the time anyway.

However, old mail habits seem to die hard (with a vengeance!). In a letter, etiquette said you had to write the person's name, their address, and your name at the end. Presuambly the envelope, which has all this information, might get physically separated from the letter.

People still write their emails in this fashion, even though the need is far less apparent. While addressing the person has generally disappeared, many (like me) still like to sign their name at the end. Is this necessary?

The answer is, it depends. If people identify themselves clearly enough from the email address (john.smith@foo.bar), then having the name at the end isn't so necessary, and I know some people who've decided they don't need to identify themselves at the end.

I know one person who often drops off the Subject, which is something more unique to email than to snail mail. I find this highly irritating, because the person doesn't even want to spend the time to make it easy for me to figure out what the email is about (this sentence seems far too long!). To me, it's the moral equivalent of not leaving a phone message when you call someone because you're embarassed that you've called them so many times without any particular reason. Oh, the person does that too.

But, that is a complete aside. I find it interesting to see how etiquette changes on the Internet, more so in, say, chat rooms, than email, where the biggest difference is the brevity of email. People now write short emails of a sentence or two, knowing that replies can be sent the same day, whereas the overhead of snail mail encourages longer letters.

There was once a complaint that the disappearance of snail mail would lead to missing information about people, that the knowledge we have of many past figures are from letters sent to spouses, friends, and colleagues. With services like gmail, where mail is never supposed to be deleted, we may be entering a time where it's quite the opposite---we'll have access to lots of email. However, the skill to write quality prose that will last the generations is likely to disappear.