I once thought that it had to be me or perhaps just the calibre of the staff in the companies I dealt with through emailed correspondence, (which, in most countries, is legally binding communication), when it came to atrocious (read: nonexistent) email etiquette.
And it is clear that:
a) No-one in any business school teaches this stuff
b) Common sense is totally absent from the process
Why, for example, when you have taken the time to CC various recipients on a mail, does the primary respondent elect to REPLY rather than REPLY TO ALL when he responds?
Is this just retarded, unconsciously stupid, deliberately obtuse or obliviously ignorant?
I'm never sure...
But when I politely reply (after having added back all the omitted people in the mail trail) requesting that ALL on the mailing list should be included in any responses, more often than not, the fuckwit simply hits the REPLY button again and thus commences the process all over again...
And if you happen to mention a person in the context of a formal communiqué, it is apposite that that person is included in the CC window, otherwise what is being implied if they are omitted?
This is akin to talking behind one's back when transparency should be the order of the day. Besides, if what you are saying about that person in a professional capacity is in any way inaccurate, it at least offers them the right of reply unless, of course, you are intending to sully their name in a private discourse.
Then there is the content of the email itself.
You are generating an enquiry which involves several questions, which, in my usual project management anal-retentive approach, I place into a numbered list requesting that my queries are addresssed point for point.
Lo and behold, in the majority of cases, the respondent might answer 60 or 80% of your queries and omit replying to the rest and thus you sit wondering if
a) They didn't manage to read to the end of the mail (another contemporary disease that besets society in our abbreviated approach to any form of detail)...
b) They did read it all but don't have all the answers...
In either case, it requires yet another email politely (but firmly) asking the twat about the unanswered questions. And if it's a typical contemporary mailmoron, you can bet that you'll be adding in all the omitted recipients which he forgot to include in his incomplete response.
Even if the fucktard has read to the end of the mail (yeah, right!), then surely it makes sense to simply write a reply along the lines of: In answer to your queries 1 - 4, I advise as follows......, however, in the case of 5 & 6, I shall have to research those issues and get back to you (they usually say "revert" which they think means "get back to you" when in fact, it simply means to return to a previous state - interesting when they always seem to exist in a state of permanent opacity!).
But no, there is simply a part answer and no suggestion that they have read, understood and are working on the balance of the unanswered shit and so commences the next round of emails.
What really slays me is when I receive a mail requesting a bunch of detailed information which I send by return mail (to all recipients and more besides if that's apposite), usually embedded below each of the queries in the original text with a covering note in the body of my response. And very often even that fails when the information supplied is deemed to be "too complicated" or too much info to digest!
There is absolutely no doubt that as we "progress"with our technological "advancements" that the facets of common sense, courtesy and the ability to actually process information moves in the opposite direction entirely if there is any type of effort or real thinking involved.
And the cherry for me is when people ask: why do you send so many emails to me?
When the obvious reply would be: Because, you fucking retard, you failed to respond to all of my original enquires in the first place and you omitted the recipients on that email and those which followed so if you are going to adopt a piecemeal approach to dealing with issues then expect an iterative approach in return.
If, however, you elect to answer all queries meaningfully and entirely and include all original recipients in that response then - hey - we would get away with just two emails to address the entire caboodle.
You fucking arsehole!
End of rant
