

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

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?<p>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.<p>Has anyone tried this?<p>Did people give you a hard time?<p>http://five.sentenc.es/
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tvon
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
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.

