A Title Is Important

There are just too many junk mails, spam and viruses crawling through msn and emails. The work email is superb at filtering out junk mails. That's great. I don't like having personal emails sent to my work account. I'm quite insistent on friends (and the man) to send personal emails to my personal email accounts. On that front, it can be quite a battle keeping the home laptop and desktop worm-and-virus-free since they will never be as secure as the work laptop. (Thank gawwd for Macs.)

I'm quite anal when it comes to email subject headings. The friends need to be really creative when titling emails to me. Otherwise I usually don't bother reading them. Many times, I've missed out on emails of substance because the friends randomly forward stuff without writing anything in the body of the message or adjusting the heading. I've been scolded quite alot. Then they got wiser. They become ingenious with their subject headings. They personalize the titles so much till it's very obvious that it can't be anything else but a legitimate email or message.

Anything with a "FW:xxxxx", "Can you take a look at this pls?", "Interesting- pls read.", "Invite: Party @ XXXXX" ...... the sort, are automatically deleted even from known senders. On IMs, I flatly ignore pop-ups of links without an additional proper sentence.

Heh. In doing the filtering, it also helps to ensure the quality of forwarded 'jokes'. It almost guarantees that anything the friends send would be satirical or dark. No toilet humor. I refuse to read idiotic-ahahha-blah jokes, or worse, chain emails. If anyone sends me a chain email or a silly, uninvestigated request for blood donation type of messages, I'll write back and hammer them on the head for not using their brains to think it through.

Since I make so many demands on the friends, of course I reciprocate by properly titling the stuff I send over, lest I get an earful for non-compliance!