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# means: No message body
Posted by Rod in TechBiz at 11:46 am on Friday, 11 August 2006

An email convention we used to use in the Glazier days was ‘#’ at the beginning of an email subject line to say there was no body in the message. E.g.

Subject: #Printer on level 3 is broken

This means you do not need to click onto the message to open it, saving hours per year. An alternative notation might be

Subject: Printer on level 3 is broken (EOM)  

I like the ‘#’ notation best.

I’m promoting this as an international standard.

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Comments(11)

    Comment by leonie at 8:14 pm on 11 August 2006

    I use (end of message) but then sometimes I get people replying asking what it means, so I guess when people don’t know what it means, that it actually ends up wasting time.




    Comment by leonie at 8:16 pm on 11 August 2006

    sorry, that was (eom) in “” brackets, but i guess the comments thing thought it was code.




    Comment by Rod at 8:50 pm on 11 August 2006

    That is why we must spread the word.




    Comment by martin at 4:30 pm on 13 August 2006

    What about those reply to all messages ?




    Comment by Tony Rule at 8:34 pm on 13 August 2006

    Awesome idea Rod. Why not propose it to Google/gmail for automatic inclusion for all emails with no body (should take them about 5 lines of code) else we will be waiting till Outlook 2011 to see such a feature :)




    Comment by Neal at 9:54 am on 14 August 2006

    # or >> is still used at Intergen today - and it’s still a great timesaver =)




    Comment by Jason at 10:51 am on 14 August 2006

    I’m not sure I see how it’s a timesaver. Every email program (including gmail) I have ever used has had a preview pane. Do people still have to double click on an email to see what it contains?

    Conversely, whenever people have gotten into putting the entire message into the Subject line, the subject lines tended to get longer and longer.

    Or is it that I just receive several orders of magnitude less email than everyone else?

    Jason




    Comment by Rod at 12:11 pm on 14 August 2006

    Hi Jason. Often I’m on an email client without preview. E.g. Blackberry.

    Agree Gmail is good especially as you can see if there is any content or not. That design element addresses the same issue.

    Also agree that long subject lines suck. Hate it when people do that.




    Comment by Jason at 9:53 am on 15 August 2006

    Ah, blackberry.

    I haven’t used one of them, but I can see how they wouldn’t want to push the entire message down to you if it can be avoided.

    It all makes more sense now.

    Jason




    Comment by Jonesie at 12:41 pm on 15 August 2006

    I wondered where that came from. You’ll be pleased to know that the convention is still in use at Intergen.




    Comment by phil at 10:51 am on 22 August 2006

    We use ‘()’ at end of subject line