Comments on: You had me at hello

By: Kevin

Kevin — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:57:17 +0000

Yes, absolutely — GMail and Outlook have it right. I can trash messages much faster with just a few lines of context.

I would love it if Thunderbird did the same thing.

By: Nate Straz

Nate Straz — Thu, 22 May 2008 12:09:52 +0000

IIRC from statistics, you can discard any data that is more than two standard deviations from the mean since that should account for 95% of the data. Since your data set is pretty large, you should be able to drop those 500+ word emails and get a more meaningful average.

By: David Illsley

David Illsley — Thu, 22 May 2008 07:32:37 +0000

FWIW, I do prefer GMail to my work inbox precisely because GMail shows the first few words and my work e-mail client doesn’t.

By: Luis Villa

Luis Villa — Thu, 22 May 2008 06:13:21 +0000

Getting the message across quickly and succinctly has always been a hallmark of good writing (‘tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.’) I agree that the tools do reinforce that message, but they aren’t the cause.

By: Bryan Clark

Bryan Clark — Thu, 22 May 2008 03:24:42 +0000

Ken: Its completely possible that you’re dead on here and the machine is making our world. Hopefully I’ll be able to document all the different clients so we can see clearly how they are representing mails like this.

By: Ken Crandall

Ken Crandall — Thu, 22 May 2008 00:21:41 +0000

Bryan,

Is it possible that the fact we can glean so much meaning from the first 2 sentences of an email is a learned behavior?

We’ve all probably had bosses or other people who said “Your message was too long, I didn’t bother to read it.” Most likely this is because Outlook (by far the most widespread corporate email client) and most other email clients, at this point, have “Summary View” or something similar which shows the sender, subject, and the first 2-4 lines of the message. If people want to get their message noticed, they would squeeze 1-2 summary sentences into the space that those two lines would accommodate.

I’m not criticizing, by any means. I think that you’re dead-on. This is also why I think that the summary and 3-pane views in Outlook/Entourage/etc. provide this little bit of email for context.