Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Email

  • Short descriptions matter

    To me, the most important part of an email is the subject line. What it tells me factors into whether I read it immediately or get back to it later. Later might take months as I don’t really have the time to read my email. Same thing with tickets. Additionally, several times a week, someone…

  • The email hammer

    A retired coworker was fond of the saying: If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. A super cranky former coworker railed about the terribleness of email. Mainly that too much stuff tried to go into email when it should be better off in RSS feeds or other. My…

  • Weird addressing

    Email addresses are weird. Web addresses run from broadest to most narrow scope, which makes total sense to me. http is the protocol basically informing the computer how to handle the request. (Back in the 90s, we more commonly also saw ftp and mailto and gopher as protocols in links.) Next is the computer address which ideally would…

  • Confuzzled Exchange

    I check accounts from two different Exchange domains with Outlook. Check might be a bit of an overstatement for one as it is maybe once a month and more like every couple. Both require me to periodically change the passwords. And both send daily email warnings leading up to the deadline. Because I might miss…

  • Post Conference Spam

    Sadly information technology conferences give our email addresses and phone numbers to the vendors who attended. That results in me getting an uptick of spam especially in the weeks after it. It is easy to tell the spam from the conference because the vendors mention the name of the conference. All the conferences do it. It…

  • “Random” Failure

    Got an update to a ticket asking if it could be closed. I clicked the link in the ticket to get to the web site to close it. The web site told me before I could do anything I needed to provide my email address. “Um, the same one you used to email me to…

  • Stop Processing More Rules

    By default Outlook adds “stop processing more rules” to message filters. Eventually I run into the error: The rule has a condition the server cannot process. The action ‘stop processing more rules’ will prevent all remaining server rules from being carried out. Are you sure this is what you want to do? Well… That is…

  • Extending Gmail Addresses

    Surprised I have not posted prior about this. Gmail allows one to use username+anything@gmail.com and have it delivered to username@gmail.com. Use it to sign up for web sites or things and filter later. Should this address be compromised, you can create a filter to delete anything sent through just that address. Keep in mind… Though I…

  • Restore Line Breaks

    File this under external brain notes. I figure I will need to do this again or explain it to someone else. Outlook removes line breaks. This probably works fine for people who work in a normal job. As I work in computers, removing these often breaks the formatting and makes the message unintelligible. For example,…