Email Annoyance

I love email. I mean, I love love email. It has changed my world and allowed me to keep in touch with people like never before. I have never liked to talk on the phone, it drives me crazy, so I was never good about calling my friends and chatting. Email has allowed me to chat whenever I can--same thing many people say. It is on my terms, even if it is 5 in the morning.

But, I get a lot of email and sometimes it is hard to keep up. Some days, I will get as many as 70 or so legitimate emails. I can be gone for a few hours only to bit hit with over 40 emails in a single morning. I have great spam filters and almost never end up with Cialis ads in my box. These are 70 real emails that need responding to. So, what is my biggest pet peeve? People who don't include my original email in their reply.

If you are responding to let's say for the sake of this conversation 50 emails a day, do you think I remember what I wrote to you in an email two days ago? I probably don't even remember sending the email! Yet their reply says things like "sounds good" or "I agree!" or something even more vague like LOL!

This causes me to have to go back in my labyrinth of sent emails and sort by sent to to find the most recent email I sent to them that they might be replying to. What a pain in the butt. I keep my email extremely organized and view my inbox by sender so I can choose who I want to deal with at any given time. I can accumulate emails from one sender then, focus on that project and knock out all my email responses at once. Then, I file all emails in the client's file and delete them out of my inbox as soon as they are addressed.

Sounds like a good system, but I remain forever bogged down in email. Blackberry, desktop, laptop, my email seems to be everywhere. I am actually considering taking a break from email our next vacation--now, if you know me, that tells you how overwhelmed I have become by my former BFF. I guess it still is my BFF. It remains my primary means of communication and often gets the job done--efficiently.

But just remember when you check that little option to not include the original email in your reply that there are people out there like me--and even much worse--whose volume of email is so great that we need that little reminder of what in the hell we were emailing about in the first place!