Ask HN: Could you limit all or most emails to five sentences?

2 points by muhamm 17 years ago | 2 comments

Because of the screen limitations of the Blackberry and iPhone and the deluge of email most people receive, is it feasible to set a hard limit on the length of your emails or would your boss or coworkers give you a hard time?

I would like to adopt this policy, informing people by way of an email signature that all of my responses will be under 5 sentences, but am not sure how it's going to go down in a professional setting.

Has anyone tried this?

Did people give you a hard time?

http://five.sentenc.es/

tvon 17 years ago |

Most business emails I receive are under five sentences, easy (and by 'most' I mean 'probably 95%'). People generally don't like typing, so the ones that are long are usually long for a reason.

I also don't see screen size being an issue, at least I read a lot of multi-page content with the iPhone and it hasn't bothered me at all.

Besides, what you propose would discourage inline responses (you know, when someone asks a few questions, you respond in context, under the question), and I for one think not enough people respond inline when it's appropriate.

anigbrowl 17 years ago | |

If only more people would reply inline! It's the one huge downside of graphic email, most people never acquired the habit of line quote/answer.

I find it incredibly rude to get a 200k email where I have to keep scrolling up and down to older stuff to see what's being referred to, when inline quoting would be so much more efficient. the worst demographic are older (>35) users who came to email late. Younger people are more succinct and early adopters of email are still efficient.

Oh well, get off my lawn.