Comments on: The importance of being important

By: Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:48:44 +0000

There was an absolutely stunning bit of work done over in the Lotus Notes parallel universe, on a thing called the “Bifrost mail manager”. it was a giant customisation of the end-user mailbox and went round doing Bayesian stuff all the tim eon the stream of incoming mail. Unfortunately, IBM went through a period of snaffling lots of these developments and rebuilding them into the next release, which made people take them offline… more’s the pity.

By: Bob Hallewell

Bob Hallewell — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:40:24 +0000

The basic problem (here I sound like my father) is a lack of standards.

As has been said, what is important to the sende may not be to the reader (unless criteria have been agreed within a team).

People generally make up what the high importance flag means
- this is important
- this is nomal
- this is unimportant tosh etc.

It’s much better for the sender to include enough information in the subject line for the recipient to understand what they want. It can also be useful to include suffixes or prefixes like [action] [info] [urgent]

By: Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:15:29 +0000

Here we examine the gap between “Important to sender” and “important to recipient”. Possibly the nastiest trick is SMTP intermediaries that strip these flags out, and lots do – generally the importace flag is set by people displaying faint signals of numptyness, and they imagine you’re going to get what they sent. Numpties, of course, tend towards ballistic reactions when their tick doesn’t turninto your pling.

As it were.

By: Nick (Important)

Nick (Important) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:23:36 +0000

Flagging your email as important improves your email’s chance of getting responded to about as much as marking your letters ‘urgent’ has of getting them delivered more quickly to their intended recipient.

By: Loz

Loz — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:05:10 +0000

I’ve found that the best way to get someone to read your email first is to use the ‘low importance’ tag. Nine times out of ten, people are intrigued by the little blue arrow and open your message to see what it is!

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:01:23 +0000

A “senior developer” once marked all of her emails as important usually because of a total lack of planning and ability. I deliberately marked them as normal. This caused said bruised ego huge problems to the point that regrading mail was disabled on the Exchange server by A N Other jobsworth.

In the same way people think that packets they tag internally as important have priority on the hurricane of the internet – it’s an utter lack of thought for the person at the other end.

By: Peter Tennant

Peter Tennant — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:59:51 +0000

Flicking through my own emails, I’ve come to realise that most people use it if the email requires a quick response. It doesn’t mean it’s WORTH responding to, but if it was, it’d need to be done quickly (if you get my drift). Perhaps they should ditch the concept of importance and replace it with a sort of best before date feature?

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:10:12 +0000

Loved Daniiel’s opening line ‘I has never had a purpose…” very profound I thought )

By: Tim Danton

Tim Danton — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 10:55:15 +0000

Interesting comments (particularly interested in this new word “emuse”). David, does your company actually have a policy in place re importance or otherwise? Bearing in mind that people seem to struggle with even arranging appointments using Outlook, I’d be amazed if they follow a company policy on marking emails of High importance (or low importance).

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:04:37 +0000

Not sure about modern SMTP servers nowadays.

The importance tag use to override the delivery priority at the mail server, therefore, if a message had high imoportance and there was a cue of a 1000 messages of normal priority, it would go to the top.

Not sure if this is the case anymore.