
Email subject lines seem to be getting longer - dannyobrien
http://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2016/02/17/are-email-subject-lines-getting-longer/
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underwater
Theory: Casual emails have been canibalized by Facebook and messaging
products, leaving just the presumably more long winded emails that are more
serious in tone.

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danielconde
If the lengthening indicates that vague subject lines such as "Hello!" or
"Changes" is being replaced by something more specific like "Meeting at 3 p.m.
agenda changed", then it's a good thing. I also like all the info in the
subject line, such as "Free pizza in the break room <eom>"

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derefr
Hypothesis: texting and Twitter have gradually forced (some) people to learn
the skill of writing concise summaries of their thoughts, where centuries of
schooling have failed.

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AstroJetson
I'm willing to buy into that. I'm very happy that they are doing that. But
sadly, many are now tying to be more concise and the subjects now look like
tweets with truncated words (please = pls) so its a new mind bender to
decipher the subject. Lots of times its read the subject, go ??!?! and the
read the body and spend a few mins trying to figure how the got the subject
lines

When I start getting emojis in subject lines it will signal the death of
email. ;-)

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brudgers
I hope that people are slowly learning to create better titles. I fear that
it's the increasing depth of "Re:"

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artmageddon
I usually keep my subject lines slightly longer than usual to make finding
them easier.

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keithpeter
I like to include enough information in the subject line so that the recipient
can make a reasonable judgement as to what the email is about and how much
time they will need to read and answer the email. That gets harder with people
you (e.g.) work with closely as the depth of the issues increases.

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ori_b
Screens are getting bigger, and more title can be visible.

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sloanesturz
If anything, screens are smaller than they were in 1999, when all mail was
read on desktop computers.

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xiaoma
Setting my massive monitor to the side (even though it's where I view by far
the most email), my phone is 750 x 1334. My 1999 monitor was 1024 x 768.

The physical dimensions of the phone are smaller, but I hold it closer to my
eyes than a monitor, so it's more about the resolution.

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plorg
Looking at my inbox I would suspect the major culprit to be marketing mail. By
far the longest subject lines come from marketing messages, most of which are
using the subject line to make their plea or call to action. Emails from real
people appear to have short subject lines. From my own experience, too, I tend
to avoid wordy subject lines, saving detail for the message body.

The listserve option seems about the least likely to me simply because
listserves have existed for a very long time. Unless mailing list names became
much longer I would suspect that any changes in subject length would simply be
in following larger trends (for example, the larger screens option).

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zbuf
The general trend upwards is interesting, but is anyone else more intrigued by
the dip in 2008 followed by the spike in 2010?

My hypothesis is that this is being heavily influenced by automated emails
from certain websites that the author is using over time.

And this could explain the general trend; that proportionally hand-written
emails make up a smaller portion of our messages these days -- a quick glance
at my inbox and automated 'notifications' are generally more likely to have
longer subject lines.

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dannyobrien
(Original author here). I suspect the 2008 strangeness may be an artifact of
my corpus: I have two email collections, both for the same address, but with
different spam-filtering etc. I'd be interested to see if it is replicated in
other email collections.

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amelius
People are using the subject line to contain the whole message?

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jaredmiwilliams
I was wondering the same. Email bodies are to blog posts as subjects are to
tweets?

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lizzard
It would be interesting to look at the data for how many 1, 2, and 3 word
subject lines there are over time. Maybe fewer "Hello" or "Thank you" subject
lines as more people got used to the idea that it's good to be specific and
informative in the email subject.

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dforrestwilson
Can confirm firsthand. Started a new job less than a year ago. My new boss
shuns/avoids/fears IM, so he'll send me emails with the message contained in
the subject line. Strikes me as a little backwards, but he's 50 years old and
prefers it to IM...

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NeutronBoy
I find it easier - at least it's all centralised and searchable. No 'did they
send an email, or an IM?'

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cm2187
English is quite terse. Perhaps the development of non english languages.

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dannyobrien
This was an almost all-English collection of emails. I'd be very interested to
see if the trend is similar in other languages. If you're interested, the
accompanying code for the blog post should be able to parse mbox, Maildir and
notmuch databases of emails.
[https://github.com/dannyob/lengthysubject](https://github.com/dannyob/lengthysubject)

