Will Schwalbe — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 12:46:19 GMT

Yaniv—Thanks so much for the incredibly thoughtful review of SEND. And I was also very interested in the comments from Chris and Laurie. “Spammy” emails are a huge problem. Everyone gripes about “Spam” and there has been some attention given lately to the huge problem of “Bacn”—but there hasn’t been nearly enough talk about genuinely personal emails that are too chatty, too frequent, or have overlong signatures. (I do think your office manager example is fascinating—it’s a classic example of how one size doesn’t fit all—and I can see how useful it would be for the office manager and the recipients). And I should add that I’m a big fan of Mark Hurst and his terrific book BIT LITERACY, so was really pleased to see that mentioned in Laurie’s comment.

And you make excellent points, too, about some of the things we missed. I wish we had put in something about the “arms race”—it’s incredibly interesting. And I’m not at all current on how to make email easier to retrieve on a search utility, so exploring that is my homework assignment for the next week.

I do, however, want to mount a mildly spirited defense of the discussion about the tonal difference between “Sincerely” and “Best.” As I’ve been talking to people, I’ve been finding that this is an area of real concern and confusion. For example, I met a very nice college student at Seton Hall a few months ago who was ridiculed by his office mates at his investment bank summer internship because he kept using “Sincerely” as his closing in all his emails to them, even after working there for more than month. They nicknamed him “Sincerely” but he still couldn’t quite see what he was doing wrong. He thought he was being polite when he was actually being stuffy.

Also, thanks for quoting the “Defcon” example. But I’m embarrassed to say that we made a mistake with it—we reversed the Defcon order. Defcon One is the highest state of alert. There’s a new edition of the book coming in September and we’ve fixed it for that; we’ve also added some discussion of “inbox zero” and other ways people have proposed to keep email from becoming overwhelming. And we put in something about handheld etiquette, too.

Finally, what a fascinating site!!! I’ll be coming back often.

Sincerely, well, er, Best! :-)

Will
co-author of SEND

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Will Schwalbe