Since moving to Berkeley a little under a year ago, I’ve started to have a commute. A good and proper, bored to tears commute via BART. A commute combined with a proper smartphone means I spent the first and last 40 minutes of every single workday answering emails and reading reddit.
While firing off some emails this evening I noticed the signature I added a long time ago: “Sent from my Nokia n900”
Originally I added the signature as a caddy jab at iPhone users who have had the “Sent from my iPhone” appended to every email sent from the device going back to January of 2007. The more I started to
think about it, these signatures actually make a lot of sense and should be included on just about every device that offers a limited email client.
If for no other reason than to inform the reader(s) of the email that it might suck, for a number of legitimate reasons.
Goddamn autocorrect: sending a grammatically flawness email from a
smartphone is impossible. Invariable an phone will auto-correct “schmidt” to
“schlong” and all of a sudden you look like a moron. Having a “Sent from my
mobile device” footer is like a disclaimer. To whom it may concern, my email
may be riddled with mistakes, you’ll have to forgive me, I’m walking down the
street responding to emails that could probably wait.
Top posting: for the record, I hate top-posts and typically try to avoid them at every turn, for reasons that I won’t go into in this post. If your top-posted message contains your “mobile disclaimer”, it’s acceptable. Trying not to top-post on smartphones these days is near-impossible, so nobody will think any less of you.
Brevity: let’s face it, there’s a lot of extra words in sentences that exist purely to provide some inter-personal lubricant. “Hey Jared, would you mind checking on those services running on those machines when you get a chance, thanks, love you too, etc.” When emailing on the go, particularly when you’re in an on-call situation, brevity is key (especially if somehow your production machines are offline). “Check services on machines 1-12” without the mobile disclaimer might make the reader think I’m an impatient twat (I am, but irregardless), instead of being strapped for time.
On the flip-side of all these reasons, if you’re using a desktop/web client, I expect you to put as much thought into composing your email as you expect me to put into reading it. You know who you are.