How to Lose Friends and Alienate People With Email

[ Part One ]

Email can be the source of aggravation in the receivers. By following these rules, you can make them mad enough to choke you:

* Ramble when you write – Put as many subjects into your email as possible. Try to make one email handle a month’s worth of information. On the other hand, your email doesn’t have to have a subject at all. Others will just love to hear you go on and on about anything! Length is important as well. The longer the better! Think of it as a filibuster.
* Use an inappropriate subject line – Your subject line should have nothing to do with your topic. It’s even more fun to come close to the topic with your subject line. That way your recipient will wonder for hours what they are missing in the email. This is always fun.
* Use all caps – Harder to read, caps, especially in a long email, will drum up business for LensCrafters. They will also add to that nice spider web of wrinkles around your recipient's eyes as they try to read them. It will give them that nice leathery look.
* use no caps – or punctuation orgrammarorcorrectspacing everyone has fun trying to figure out what you wrote
* CC everyone you can imagine, especially their superior – This is especially good when your recipient has slipped up and made a mistake. If the mistake is small, do this before you have all the information so it looks a lot bigger than it really is. This is also effective when dealing with confidential or sensitive information.
* Use a lot of sarcasm and off-beat humor in your email – It is hard to tell the difference between humor/sarcasm and sincerity without the facial expressions, body language, and tone. So yuk it up. This works especially well with people with whom you have little personal contact or who are extremely sensitive.
* Use email to deliver bad news – It gets you out of that uncomfortable face-to-face situation when you have to give someone bad news. Who wants to hear all that crying anyway?
* Send a flame message quickly – When letting someone have it, send your flame fast. Get it there while the feelings are still hot. You might not want to send it tomorrow.
* Have a long signature line – The longer the better. Ten to fifteen lines would be right in this case. Use it to publicize your uncle’s life insurance agency or to tell every one about your grandmother’s real estate company. Think of it as a billboard. You might even be able to sell advertising space in your email signature if you send enough.
* Send many attachments – This helps make your email so big it will take a long time to download it. Photos are good, as are links to web sites that you’ve visited where your computer acted strangely afterward. As a bonus, you just might sneak in a virus you didn’t know you picked up. On a related topic…
* Don’t tell the recipient why you’re sending the attachments – This is even sweeter when the attachments have strange names that give no clue as to what they are. Big fun!
* Send “action or else” messages – State that if you don’t hear from them by a particular date, you’ll take some specific action (preferably one that they would not want taken). Then, send the email late.
* Use plenty of acronyms and buzzwords – LOL, BRB, LMAO, ROFL will keep your recipient amused.
* Send repeated corrections – Send an email and then, hours later, send a correction. Change some of the email — better yet, change a lot of it — or add an attachment (see above). Do this repeatedly, at least 4 – 5 times.
* Use the “Urgent” flag often – Hey, it’s urgent to you, isn’t it?
* Request receipts on every email – It says you care. It also says, “I’m getting proof that you got this, you lying bastard.”
* Forward messages but don’t say why you did – The fun is in the guessing, right?
* Don’t consider the recipient – Your boss will love that informal way you have of saying things.
* Write your email to one person and send it to someone else – This works great when you are talking about the person you sent it to. You write to Tim about what a bastard John is. Then, send it to John.

[ Part Two ]

Sending email to aggravate someone is easy. There are so many tactics at one’s disposal. Initiative is even on the side of the sender. But, if there is a person who has gotten your thong in a knot and they seem to be begging for a good pimp-slapping, there are some things that you can do when you're on the receiving end of the email. The amount is not as copious as for the sender, but they can be just as effective.

* Ignore their email – So many people assume that since email gets there faster, you’ll read it faster. Make that someone feel more special by letting their email “breathe” for awhile in your inbox. Remember, you want to be at your best when you read it. Being your best takes time. This is especially effective if the sender has marked it “Urgent”. Remember, your urgent and their urgent are different. Yours is more important. You can stay ahead of them by reading the email, but not letting them know that you have. You can do that if you…
* Configure your email client to not send receipts automatically – Obnoxious senders will request a read receipt to make sure you got their email and put you on the spot. How dare them use your tactic! Short-circuit their attempts by not sending one to them.
* Use the “Reply to all” button — Use this if the email is sent to a lot of people and the subject is sensitive or confidential. If the sender is doing some damage control on a mistake, capitalize on this now while everyone can know it.
* Ignore the topic when you reply — When you finally get around to replying to the person’s email, ignore the topic of the original email. Even better, just send the reply but don’t write anything. Later, send an email back why the person hasn’t replied to you. For more fun, mention the deadline they “missed”.
* Forward their email to someone else — This works best with sensitive and confidential material. Someone admits to spending quality time with that special someone? I’ll bet their spouse would enjoy reading about that. Go ahead, hit that forward button! A real knee-slapper!
* Misspell their name – No other word, in any language, is more important than one’s own name. Use it and misspell it often.
* All of ysterday’s suggestions about spelling, caps, punctuation, etc, still count – Use them to your heart’s content!

Short but sweet. By using these techniques, you can make anyone hate just thinking of you!

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