Comments on: Subject line tricks

By: mike

mike — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 18:39:53 +0000

in my group of friends, rather than a workplace (although most of the email are read in a corporate env) we use the following prefixes:

“fun/” for stuff that are amusing or fnny
“link/” for more informational links
“!!!/” for important things.

i find that the diagonal line of the slash makes for a very good separator. while not taking as much space as [ and ]. using it you don’t need to space between the tag and the subject line.

By: Randy

Randy — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 22:41:56 +0000

We have used normal subject line with a pre-pended priority code such as:

911: Subject Line Here (emergency, or extremely urgent — needs to be dealt with immediately)

811: Subject Line Here (very important — needs to be dealt with within the hour)

411: Subject Line Here (just general info — deal with it at your leisure)

Also when an issue was sent to a group of people, whoever was going to deal with the matter would reply-to-all with IGI: Re: Subject Line Here. (IGI meaning “I Got It”)

By: AK

AK — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 18:34:19 +0000

I’m with Rob. All my emails are sent with a prefix.

Common ones are:
Link: (for a cool site or stuff)
News: (industry related news)
ProjectNumber: (for project related stuff)
Launch: (for something that went live)
FYI: (for your info, usually of small importance)

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 13:52:38 +0000

As with any communications system/jargon, if the goal is efficiency, you need to agree among the group involved on the protocols – the accepted terms, what they mean, when they’re used, and what the expected reaction/response should be.

I’ve worked in offices where they use Hot/Action/Info for priorities. If someone new comes in and doesn’t understand the jargon and protocols, this doesn’t always make sense to them.

Of course, with any human system, once people get the hang of the basic protocals, they WILL extend and “enhance” the language and protocols.

By: Armin

Armin — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 22:15:20 +0000

I don’t do it as often as I should (but then neither do others I work with), changing the subject line to be more appropriate can be very helpful. In particular in combination with shortening the original e-mail.

Example:
You receive a monthly status report from somebody with the subject line “MSR Joe Bloggs March 2005″. One specific point raises a concern, say project X, and you want to forward to somebody with a comment.

Most people just forward the whole mail with an unchanged subject line, i.e. “FW: MSR Joe Bloggs March 2005″.

I recommend to change the subject line to what the e-mail is really about, e.g. “Issue with Project X, need your input”. And then remove all the points from the MSR not related to project X.

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 22:45:18 +0000

All e-mails I send have a short 4-6 letter prefix to help identify the project/task/subject they are related to. It makes replies a lot easier to pick out. It also helps in sorting and filtering when I need to work on only one project and ignore everything else.

For example

Proj1-Status Update
Proj1-New server list
Proj3-New server PO

By: Jon Strande

Jon Strande — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 20:23:12 +0000

Bren,

Yeah, with all the email any little bit helps.

There was an article in Fast Company a while back about this very thing:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/44/intel.html

Jon

By: optimus

optimus — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 19:52:59 +0000

I worked for a Canadian bank, and we had a policy of prefacing the subject line with one of three ‘tags’: URG, ACT, or FYI — urgent action needed, action needed, or simply informational. we joked that they needed to add ‘USL’ for useless emails, the volume of which always seemed to be triple that of normal email.

By: Josh Bancroft

Josh Bancroft — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 18:48:57 +0000

Josh OOO ROD RBCOP

means

Josh out of office rest of day, reachable by cell or pager.

Stuff like this has almost become a self parody in my group at work. We try to see how cryptic we can be and still be understood. The threshold is much further on the cryptic side that I would have initally guessed. :-)

Josh Bancroft
http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com/

By: Ian McKenzie

Ian McKenzie — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 17:57:12 +0000

I’ve used the trick, but have ended up answering a reply something to the effect, “your email was blank, please resend.” The net effect is to spend more time replying than I saved in the shortcut.