The language of e-mail 97
the sender is connected (it may also disappear into cyberspace
and never be seen again).^4 The same considerations affect copies
of messages – though e-mail manuals additionally raise the prag-
matic question of the decision-making behind copied messages.^5
The sending of time-wasting, unnecessary copies is criticized, and
caution is expressed over the use of blind copies – for instance, if
people other than the intended recipients learn of their existence,
the motives of the writer may be questioned. If there are several
main or copy recipients, the question of the order in which their
addresses are listed may be relevant: in strongly hierarchical insti-
tutions, senior people may expect to see their names at the front of
a list. A principle of alphabetical order is often advocated to avoid
provoking unintended misinterpretation. So is the avoidance of
excessive use of the priority feature: if every message is marked
urgent, the convention ceases to be meaningful.
The language of the subject line, however, has received a great
deal of attention. Because it is the first thing that the recipient re-
ceives, along with the sender’s name, it is a critical element in the
decision-making over what priority to assign to it or whether to
open it at all (in the case of someone who receives many e-mails
every day). A great deal of junk-mail, if not automatically filtered
out, is known to be junk only because of the subject description.
Subjects such as ‘Free Your Life Forever’, ‘Win $31,000,000 dollars
andaPTCruiser!’,and‘ConfidentialityAssured!’canbeconfidently
categorized as junk (though I am not thereby denying its interest
tosome),ascanmostmessageswhosesubjectisincapitalsthrough-
out (‘DO YOU HAVE THE YEN TO BE A MILLIONAIRE?’,
(^4) In general text, e-mail addresses are often placed within angle brackets to show that
any adjacent punctuation is not part of the address. Typographical difficulty can arise
if an e-address needs to be broken at the end of a line, as an unhyphenated break will
leave it unclear whether a space is intended as part of the address, and a hyphenated
break will leave it unclear whether the hyphen is part of the address or not. Usage guides
suggest that the only unambiguous place to break is before or after the @ symbol (without
hyphen). Similarly, an address at the end of a sentence may need to be separated from
the sentence-ending punctuation. In this book, all e-addresses are placed within angle
5 brackets.
Examples of such manuals are Angell and Heslop (1994), Lamb and Peek (1995), Flynn
and Flynn (1998).