A succinct email in just a subject line

https://rubenerd.com/a-succinct-email-in-just-a-subject-line/

by Tomte • 1 year ago

44 49 1 year ago

rubenerd.com

asdfman123• 1 year ago

Ive been in EOM places. It's a helpful tool.

Usually these kind of messages go better in chats though, so I haven't found myself missing the format.

slow_typist• 1 year ago

Former secretary sent me EOM mails, not sure where she picked it up. She is fantastic, and very effective in keeping the organisational fallout in check. I had reasons to leave the place but now I have to survive without her.

loopdoend• 1 year ago

I thought the notation in Usenet was to end the title in (nt) for no text

thunkingdeep3• 1 year ago

Further proof to me that slack + a daily digest for each department is the perfect medium for professional communications inside technical organization.

gabesullice• 1 year ago

Do you mean a daily digest of Slack comms?

thunkingdeep3• 1 year ago

No, just a daily brief from section leaders.

I’m sure there’s slack plugins for what you’re suggesting, though. Not sure how useful it’d be since most big ticket items would be in the brief each day and the smaller ephemeral stuff gets resolved with slack messages or chats.

alextingle2• 1 year ago

Slack just seems so clunky to me, after years of using Telegram. Feels more like a knock-off Discord. Just me?

TeMPOraL6• 1 year ago

Isn't Discord a knock-off Slack but for gamers?

I'd definitely bucket Telegram and Discord together (one as IM, other as this... Slack-like thing, I really don't have a better name for this category) - in that both are ridiculously overstimulating, with stickers and animations, and shit constantly moving or notifying you or ... my brain can't handle prolonged exposure to either, it's just too much stimulation (and not of the useful kind).

nottorp3• 1 year ago

You must have not been around long :)

Slack is an improved irc and so is Discord now, in spite of it launching as a better and free teamspeak...

Slack has better support for people working together on something, Discord has better support for memes and emoji and stuff like that.

theshrike79• 1 year ago

Slack is Discord for corporations pretty much.

Discord has integrations for self-hosted game servers and RPG rules etc.

Slack has integrations for Linear, Github, Google Docs etc. Corporate stuff.

dmitrygr• 1 year ago

I’ve been using <EOM> in subject for a while. I seem to recall picking it up sometime while working at Google.

TeMPOraL6• 1 year ago

My wife hates those with burning passion. I used it exactly once and then learned not to.

Part of the reason is that people doing it don't put EOM to terminate the title. But the other part is that MUAs love to truncate the subject line for display because "UX", and the most popular ones (like GMail web interface, or Outlook) are janky - so in the end, what happens is, you have to open that email anyway, and then you see just signature with nothing above, and the obvious first thought is, "that stupid email client broke again", followed by "or the sender accidentally clicked 'send' before writing the message", both of which are much more likely than someone using subject-line-only message.

Doesn't also help that most normies can't communicate to save their lives, so the title is gibberish and full of typos. There's a minimum volume of text you need to error-correct that, and subject line alone isn't enough.

aitchnyu• 1 year ago

Are you talking about English-native people when you mean normies? Is the whole world plagued by gibberish, meandering sentences and ghosting?

becquerel• 1 year ago

If they do, then I would agree with them.

dave4420• 1 year ago

Native English speaker here.

The number of times I’ve returned to a message I’ve left in a slack/forum thread to find typos, missing words etc is embarrassing.

I can’t imagine my emails would be any better.

TeMPOraL6• 1 year ago

I'm talking about English-natives, ESL, and Polish people, as my experience is limited to the languages I can read well enough to tell what's typo or careless writing (or autocorrect on the phone + not giving a frak).

Extrapolating from the Internet experience, however, I believe it's likely the whole world is plagued by gibberish. Stuff like, to use a recent real example, "hey i dont see your emails in orgs SENT AILFOX", which I was asked by the recipient to translate to real language, and which turned out to mean "Hey, so I am an impatient idiot and couldn't wait 15 seconds for our janky SaaS mail interface to load before shooting you a passive-aggressive message".

(Whenever I start thinking too many good thoughts about humanity and people in general, I get shown stuff like this to be reminded that niceness and good communication exist only in sci-fi shows.)

I'm not sure what you mean by "ghosting" in this context, but if you mean the situation where you ask more that one question in your message, and the recipient silently ignores all of them except the least important one, then yes, that's something I witnessed in both Polish and English from people from all around the world. I assume it generalizes too.

As for meandering sentences, that's a different subject to being careless and not giving a frak - but there's a reason summarization is one of the most popular uses of LLMs.

mr_mitm• 1 year ago

In my company, it's somewhat common to use "SO:" at the front of the subject, meaning "Subject only". This would address your point about MUAs truncating the subject and work just as well.

Maybe it would be helpful to put "SO means 'subject only'" or something in the body, which could be automated, to further decrease confusion.

jey• 1 year ago

Works fine if you copy the subject line into the body too

dmurray• 1 year ago

My Outlook at work shows the first line of the body alongside the subject, and adds <EOM> if the entire message fits in that preview line.

This seems as good as or better than having people add the "<eom>" marker manually, because it doesn't rely on people remembering it and because it knows exactly how much text can be displayed in my current view.

I've never spent time customizing this client, so I assumed this was a default setting, but nobody else is mentioning this so maybe it's not? Maybe my company's IT team added this or enabled a setting. Or maybe every enterprise company has this but all the others encourage adding dozens of lines of nonsense "signature" boilerplate and disclaimers, so nobody gets the benefit of the feature.

TeMPOraL6• 1 year ago

Or maybe every enterprise company has this but all the others encourage adding dozens of lines of nonsense "signature" boilerplate and disclaimers, so nobody gets the benefit of the feature.

If you don't use a signature yourself, then I'd assume it's most likely this. Every company I've seen or been a part of does indeed "encourage adding dozens of lines of nonsense "signature" boilerplate and disclaimers".

edelbitter• 1 year ago

In German language (kwT) remains reasonably common. "kein weiterer Text" = no further content. Often still duplicated in the body, because people read their messages on all sorts of funny devices / in all sorts of funny clients.

Even better than any such marker: Rearranging so the acronym (e.g. LGTM, NAK, ASAP) or greeting/valediction is the last word, ticking off both the formalities and the EOM marker simultaneously.

TZubiri• 1 year ago

Psa.

Title can be viewed by more admin roles than content.

Mistletoe• 1 year ago

I prefer this.

https://tron.fandom.com/wiki/End_of_Line

"End of Line" in Tron still gives me chills.

NetOpWibby• 1 year ago

I had the same thought.

Such great films.

TeMPOraL6• 1 year ago

Oh, so that's where this came from.

From your link:

In the reimagined Battlestar Galactica television series, the Cylon Hybrids often use this phrase when reciting system information about the Base-Ships.

I learned it as a specific phrase from that show, and its use there is chills-inducing too.

adrianmonk• 1 year ago

I'll be opening your email anyway so my client marks it as read. So this saves me literally zero time.

mmcallister• 1 year ago

I always found these incredibly rude, in my experience it's typically senior management, and specifically those who like to really make you feel like a nameless "human resource"

Though I haven't seen it in recent years with (better) workplace messaging platform, like Slack

Mudasir_Fayaz• 1 year ago

This is a great reminder of a simple email trick! Using (EOM) in the subject line could save time, especially for teams dealing with tons of emails. But yeah, if people aren’t used to it, they might just get confused. Maybe it’s worth bringing back? Also, crazy to think 2005 was 20 years ago—time flies...

nottorp3• 1 year ago

In the modern world, if you don't add anything in the body you may end up in spam.

Personally i put "Subject says it all" in the body if I have a one phrase message to send.

caseyy3• 1 year ago

What about spam filtering? Wouldn't these emails (especially cross-domain) be more likely picked up as spam?

orthoxerox• 1 year ago

I tried doing this at work, including adding end-of-message markers to the subject line. No one got it. Now I just copy and paste the subject line into the message body.

Another old-school habit no one gets anymore is subject references, e.g., 'subject: "Project X status report", body: "Fred, we need to submit subj by noon, are you done with it? Can't find it in the usual place. Bob"'

ph4evers• 1 year ago

I received one when I asked for a quote after I didn’t respond for 24 hours with “What do you think of the price??”

I went for the competitor

thinkingemote• 1 year ago

Early on, maybe before instant messaging and before graphical mail clients with preview windows, people often used subject lines as the main message. The one I remember was "NT" at the end of the message to mean "No Text".

Turns out there's a bunch more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_email_subject_abbrevia...

xtiansimon• 1 year ago

I recall reading about this and the end mark was n/m, no message, or n/b, no body.

Above there was a comment suggesting to duplicate the subject in the message body. In which case I think EOM would be appropriate.

Interesting diversity for the same idea.

majkinetor• 1 year ago

I demand this on ticket subject - I don't like to have to load the details page to know what exactly ticket is about - subject needs to 100% describe what is going on in a changelog friendly construction. I enter the ticket when I need implementation and other details.

Note that the company is full of seniors and literary nobody does that - I edit almost 100% of ticket subjects. Maybe 1 or 2 people in last 10 years adopted this style and we are talking here about top engineers. Subjects they make are in the form "login error" or "Error 500 when getting bank account", like that describes anything at all (such subjects are 100% useless)

So doing this in the wild is totally innapropriate.

sam_lowry_• 1 year ago

I spent almost 20 years moderating subjects written by others in an online community, and I finally got rid of subjects completely.

Instead, I offered users a text area and generated subjects from the first 80 characters of the body.

With a bit of rule-based cleanup, it worked wonders.

@dang, idea for your overworked self.

geor9e• 1 year ago

I will never use EOM, as a matter of principle. Niche jargon removes friction for a minority, and adds friction for a majority who are forced to google it.

I do send one liner emails, but with a blank subject. For most email apps they show up as "George (no subject) - What's your middle name?" or similar.

nunez• 1 year ago

Oh man; working at Jane Street taught me about these.

My manager at the time would send these when he was busy (which was often). I thought it was brilliant.

I still do this today, 10 years later, usually when I can't just DM them in some way. This happens A LOT as a consultant or consultant-adjacent persona. You're interacting with a client or customer, but aren't in their messaging platform because you haven't/won't be onboarded.

It works extremely well with inbox zero as well. I've been inbox zero for almost 20 years. My inbox is a to-do list; anything that doesn't require action gets deleted or archived. An `/eom` email means I can read the whole thing in a phone notification and bin it right then and there. One fewer hop.

A succinct email in just a subject line

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