Simple, Unclickable, Direct, Efficient Email

AT THE START of every academic year, I ask new students to send me e-mail with a specific subject, in a specific format, to a specific address with a specific payload. If done correctly, the incoming mail weighs less than 50kb. I rarely download mail onto my mobile phone if it weighs more than 100kb. In fact, most bloated mail gets killed at my server without me knowing its fate. I set that up and it's served me well because at the moment I'm somehow exceeding two gigabytes of monthly data usage over the air with O2-Ireland. Until recently, I was synching my Exchange Mail to my Nokia N86 handset. That resulted in some memory issues on the handset because my work colleagues can't stop themselves from attaching bloated documents to their emails. They never learned to correspond differently. But one thing for sure: if you don't respond to an email with some sort of acknowledgement, people think you haven't received it. Currently, I have 55 inbound emails from new students about a C902 low-resolution video shot in Iraq and I cannot walk onto the college campus without getting stopped by the question, "Did you get my email?"

So I'm sending polite acknowledgements when I view those incoming emails. And as I do, I notice people on Twitter yammering on about seeing tweets with links to unwelcome content. It makes me wonder how Twitter has dumbed-down our behaviour because it seems a lot of otherwise intelligent people just read and click on everything they get. If that's true, it's no wonder why viruses, malware, and worms are still running around the internet. I imagine it's easier to pass around links to unwelcome content because people have handheld access to Twitter and Facebook now and those tweeted links seem to encourage clicking instead of thinking.

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Previously -- "My mail weighs less than 100k", 20 Sep 03 on IrishEyes.

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