My wife hates those with burning passion. I used it exactly once and then learned not to.
Part of the reason is that people doing it don't put EOM to terminate the title. But the other part is that MUAs love to truncate the subject line for display because "UX", and the most popular ones (like GMail web interface, or Outlook) are janky - so in the end, what happens is, you have to open that email anyway, and then you see just signature with nothing above, and the obvious first thought is, "that stupid email client broke again", followed by "or the sender accidentally clicked 'send' before writing the message", both of which are much more likely than someone using subject-line-only message.
Doesn't also help that most normies can't communicate to save their lives, so the title is gibberish and full of typos. There's a minimum volume of text you need to error-correct that, and subject line alone isn't enough.
In my company, it's somewhat common to use "SO:" at the front of the subject, meaning "Subject only". This would address your point about MUAs truncating the subject and work just as well.
Maybe it would be helpful to put "SO means 'subject only'" or something in the body, which could be automated, to further decrease confusion.
I'm talking about English-natives, ESL, and Polish people, as my experience is limited to the languages I can read well enough to tell what's typo or careless writing (or autocorrect on the phone + not giving a frak).
Extrapolating from the Internet experience, however, I believe it's likely the whole world is plagued by gibberish. Stuff like, to use a recent real example, "hey i dont see your emails in orgs SENT AILFOX", which I was asked by the recipient to translate to real language, and which turned out to mean "Hey, so I am an impatient idiot and couldn't wait 15 seconds for our janky SaaS mail interface to load before shooting you a passive-aggressive message".
(Whenever I start thinking too many good thoughts about humanity and people in general, I get shown stuff like this to be reminded that niceness and good communication exist only in sci-fi shows.)
I'm not sure what you mean by "ghosting" in this context, but if you mean the situation where you ask more that one question in your message, and the recipient silently ignores all of them except the least important one, then yes, that's something I witnessed in both Polish and English from people from all around the world. I assume it generalizes too.
As for meandering sentences, that's a different subject to being careless and not giving a frak - but there's a reason summarization is one of the most popular uses of LLMs.
My Outlook at work shows the first line of the body alongside the subject, and adds <EOM> if the entire message fits in that preview line.
This seems as good as or better than having people add the "<eom>" marker manually, because it doesn't rely on people remembering it and because it knows exactly how much text can be displayed in my current view.
I've never spent time customizing this client, so I assumed this was a default setting, but nobody else is mentioning this so maybe it's not? Maybe my company's IT team added this or enabled a setting. Or maybe every enterprise company has this but all the others encourage adding dozens of lines of nonsense "signature" boilerplate and disclaimers, so nobody gets the benefit of the feature.
> Or maybe every enterprise company has this but all the others encourage adding dozens of lines of nonsense "signature" boilerplate and disclaimers, so nobody gets the benefit of the feature.
If you don't use a signature yourself, then I'd assume it's most likely this. Every company I've seen or been a part of does indeed "encourage adding dozens of lines of nonsense "signature" boilerplate and disclaimers".
In German language (kwT) remains reasonably common. "kein weiterer Text" = no further content. Often still duplicated in the body, because people read their messages on all sorts of funny devices / in all sorts of funny clients.
Even better than any such marker: Rearranging so the acronym (e.g. LGTM, NAK, ASAP) or greeting/valediction is the last word, ticking off both the formalities and the EOM marker simultaneously.
I will never use EOM, as a matter of principle. Niche jargon removes friction for a minority, and adds friction for a majority who are forced to google it.
I do send one liner emails, but with a blank subject. For most email apps they show up as "George (no subject) - What's your middle name?" or similar.
Oh man; working at Jane Street taught me about these.
My manager at the time would send these when he was busy (which was often). I thought it was brilliant.
I still do this today, 10 years later, usually when I can't just DM them in some way. This happens A LOT as a consultant or consultant-adjacent persona. You're interacting with a client or customer, but aren't in their messaging platform because you haven't/won't be onboarded.
It works extremely well with inbox zero as well. I've been inbox zero for almost 20 years. My inbox is a to-do list; anything that doesn't require action gets deleted or archived. An `/eom` email means I can read the whole thing in a phone notification and bin it right then and there. One fewer hop.
I demand this on ticket subject - I don't like to have to load the details page to know what exactly ticket is about - subject needs to 100% describe what is going on in a changelog friendly construction. I enter the ticket when I need implementation and other details.
Note that the company is full of seniors and literary nobody does that - I edit almost 100% of ticket subjects. Maybe 1 or 2 people in last 10 years adopted this style and we are talking here about top engineers. Subjects they make are in the form "login error" or "Error 500 when getting bank account", like that describes anything at all (such subjects are 100% useless)
So doing this in the wild is totally innapropriate.
Readit News
Part of the reason is that people doing it don't put EOM to terminate the title. But the other part is that MUAs love to truncate the subject line for display because "UX", and the most popular ones (like GMail web interface, or Outlook) are janky - so in the end, what happens is, you have to open that email anyway, and then you see just signature with nothing above, and the obvious first thought is, "that stupid email client broke again", followed by "or the sender accidentally clicked 'send' before writing the message", both of which are much more likely than someone using subject-line-only message.
Doesn't also help that most normies can't communicate to save their lives, so the title is gibberish and full of typos. There's a minimum volume of text you need to error-correct that, and subject line alone isn't enough.
Maybe it would be helpful to put "SO means 'subject only'" or something in the body, which could be automated, to further decrease confusion.
The number of times I’ve returned to a message I’ve left in a slack/forum thread to find typos, missing words etc is embarrassing.
I can’t imagine my emails would be any better.
Extrapolating from the Internet experience, however, I believe it's likely the whole world is plagued by gibberish. Stuff like, to use a recent real example, "hey i dont see your emails in orgs SENT AILFOX", which I was asked by the recipient to translate to real language, and which turned out to mean "Hey, so I am an impatient idiot and couldn't wait 15 seconds for our janky SaaS mail interface to load before shooting you a passive-aggressive message".
(Whenever I start thinking too many good thoughts about humanity and people in general, I get shown stuff like this to be reminded that niceness and good communication exist only in sci-fi shows.)
I'm not sure what you mean by "ghosting" in this context, but if you mean the situation where you ask more that one question in your message, and the recipient silently ignores all of them except the least important one, then yes, that's something I witnessed in both Polish and English from people from all around the world. I assume it generalizes too.
As for meandering sentences, that's a different subject to being careless and not giving a frak - but there's a reason summarization is one of the most popular uses of LLMs.
This seems as good as or better than having people add the "<eom>" marker manually, because it doesn't rely on people remembering it and because it knows exactly how much text can be displayed in my current view.
I've never spent time customizing this client, so I assumed this was a default setting, but nobody else is mentioning this so maybe it's not? Maybe my company's IT team added this or enabled a setting. Or maybe every enterprise company has this but all the others encourage adding dozens of lines of nonsense "signature" boilerplate and disclaimers, so nobody gets the benefit of the feature.
If you don't use a signature yourself, then I'd assume it's most likely this. Every company I've seen or been a part of does indeed "encourage adding dozens of lines of nonsense "signature" boilerplate and disclaimers".
Title can be viewed by more admin roles than content.
Even better than any such marker: Rearranging so the acronym (e.g. LGTM, NAK, ASAP) or greeting/valediction is the last word, ticking off both the formalities and the EOM marker simultaneously.
I do send one liner emails, but with a blank subject. For most email apps they show up as "George (no subject) - What's your middle name?" or similar.
My manager at the time would send these when he was busy (which was often). I thought it was brilliant.
I still do this today, 10 years later, usually when I can't just DM them in some way. This happens A LOT as a consultant or consultant-adjacent persona. You're interacting with a client or customer, but aren't in their messaging platform because you haven't/won't be onboarded.
It works extremely well with inbox zero as well. I've been inbox zero for almost 20 years. My inbox is a to-do list; anything that doesn't require action gets deleted or archived. An `/eom` email means I can read the whole thing in a phone notification and bin it right then and there. One fewer hop.
Note that the company is full of seniors and literary nobody does that - I edit almost 100% of ticket subjects. Maybe 1 or 2 people in last 10 years adopted this style and we are talking here about top engineers. Subjects they make are in the form "login error" or "Error 500 when getting bank account", like that describes anything at all (such subjects are 100% useless)
So doing this in the wild is totally innapropriate.