Confuseder

Confused part 2: email

Disclaimer: this does not refer to anyone specific or any emails received or sent, I'm having a ponder.

Email has the most extraordinary capacity to confuse. (As does postal mail, but who gets that any more? Not I , said she, lyingly) Amazon just recommended a DVD that is now unavailable. How incredibly useful. Plough through the tedious "buy your Christmas presents from us! It's so great!" and then see what's left. Not a lot usually, but it's terribly nicely organised with filters and labels and all.

The ignored are still ignoring back (better go to facebook and send some plants), the unignored strangely feeling ignored and the lost remain lost.

I don't understand the etiquette of email. For one, when you do a semi-formal email, it looks really silly if you use "Dear Sir" and "yours faithfully" but if you don't, then is that not rude? Is it rude to do formal things by email at all? But things like job applications are often asked for by email, so it is necessary. Most people seem to do "Hi NAME" and sign off with "regards", but you can guarantee if you choose "regards" you'll get a reply that says "kind regards" and you immediately feel bad for not being kind.

And what about the reply bit, it gets a bit silly when you are thanking someone for thanking you for thanking them for thanking you for thanking them for doing something good/nice/useful, but at what point is it ok to not say "thank you for replying to my email"? I'm sure we didn't used to do that with letters, I definitely don't remember doing "thank you for your thank you card" cards.

Noone seems to feel happy with the number of emails they receive from someone. The person I email most seems to feel neglected half the time, yet all the people I don't speak to much feel much more rightly neglected, while I feel if they wanted to, they could get in touch too. And the poor people I neglect to neglect are probably sick of seeing my name in their inbox. There should be some sort of mechanism for knowing who wants to hear from you, but then again, that would probably be EXTREMELY embarrassing.

Oh, if only we all wrote letters like we used to. Once a year, same people, same words. Easy.