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bearcatsandor
5y

I am beginning to hate the relationship between email and my clients. I never thought it would come to the point where email is the worst communication platform I've ever used because some of my clients simply don't know how to use it properly.

I have one client who never uses the subject header in his emails. This makes conversational threads very difficult to follow, and I can't just scan the inbox I have for him. I have to actually do searches on my emails just to find recent conversations.

For some reason nobody knows how to start a new email thread. I have multiple clients that will just take the last email that I sent them, regardless of what it's about, and start a new conversation completely unrelated to the other email by hitting"reply". I end up with email threads that are 60 to 100 emails long and contain many different subjects, which again makes it hard to find anything. Never mind that they've usually put two or three important attachments, or username password combinations, or other valuable information in there amongst all the noise.

Worst of all, I have a few clients and co-workers who insist on starting a new email thread whenever anything about a particular issue comes up. This means that just today I have five separate email threads about the same goddamn issue from the same damn person. Am I supposed to respond to each thread with the same damned information? One of these people is supposed to be both a media consultant and an SEO expert and really should know better. Also, if you do actually send me an email with a subject like "the robot.txt error", please don't give me one sentence about that and five paragraphs about what color you'd like the background to be. That's ridiculous. How the hell am I supposed to find that later? Especially since we already discussed this in the other email that sitting in my inbox.

I swear I am setting up a bug tracking system simply so that my clients can log in and leave me bug reports, and feature requests, and will stop filling up my poor email boxes with what amounts to piles and piles threads that I have to sort through.

For a person who suffers with a form of ADD this is extremely frustrating. Why is it so difficult for my colleagues and clients to write good emails with good subject lines, and reply to the right damn emails?

Am I just being too anal, or does this bother others as well?

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  • 3
    5y
    Email needs to burn in hell. And yeah a big tracker is good...
    ...
    ...
    If they use it. I made one so fucking simple at my last place and the useless cunts still emailed or texted me issues. The only thing I would do better is have one without Auth on the company intranet so it’s even easier to click, add issue. But still. Retards will be retards.
  • 0
    5y
    That's probably a good idea with the issue tracker! Give it a try!
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
  • 1
    5y
    @heyhen I have a good atlassian system set up, so I'll be using their Service Desk
  • 0
    5y
    @bearcatsandor Cool, also you may google/youtube/medium.com a bit about CCM "Customer Communication Managment" software.
  • 1
    5y
    and could you imagine to hire a virtual assistant? Someone who manages your inbox and looks after your schedule and marketing so that you can focus on the things that matters to you the most?
  • 0
    5y
    @M1sf3t I agree. and besides there are hundreds of add-ons for it so if you're missing a future you can just add it.
  • 1
    5y
    No. This is spot-on.
  • 1
    5y
    @M1sf3t Astrophysics is kinda boring, at least from my brief forays into it.
  • 0
    5y
    Not knowing what email client you are using, this is a good scenario for OneNote. It really is a good tool. Yes, you are manually managing things, but you can "send to OneNote" based on topic or user, and it makes things infinitely more manageable.
  • 1
    5y
    @iAmNaN Gmail ... Which is probably half my problem.
  • 0
    5y
    @bearcatsandor I have Outlook set up to retrieve my email from Gmail, I can use the rules and other features that it has, and make use of OneNote.
  • 1
    5y
    @iAmNaN I'm a Linux console guy, so if I did that it would be with Mutt. I've considered it.
  • 0
    5y
    Is not so much my mail set up that needs to change, it's the behavior of others.
  • 0
    5y
    @bearcatsandor there are Basket and Zim, which are sort of close, and there is OneNote online (O365), but that requires a subscription. In spite of the demand, the open source community is slow in providing a comparable app.
  • 0
    5y
    @iAmNaN Do the rules work consistently for you? I tried it out cause I hate how bloated my inbox is from random shit. Made like 10 different folders named Tech, Credit cards, Games, Amazon, etc. Made rules for each of them to grab an email with a particular address and throw it in its folder. Figured every time I got an email relating to one of my topics I would just right click it and add it to the rule for that sender address.

    Yet, emails from those addresses still came through to my inbox. Some would, some wouldn’t. I made sure that they were the exact address I made a rule for too. Figured Outlook was just buggy in that area. Said fuck it and never used it again.
  • 0
    5y
    @MrCush Outlook rules require care in setting up sometimes, or you will end up with duplicates. I haven't thought about it before, but I wonder if they added a send to OneNote Rule. That would be nice. Then again, I'm not sure I've would want to automate sending to OneNote, because I don't want everything stored there.
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