Have a colleague who sends too many emails? Let him know, anonymously | Hacker News Reader

Have a colleague who sends too many emails? Let him know, anonymously

minimize.email

20 pointsgonsanchezs25 comments

Awesome tool for exercising your passive aggression! We have built too much trust among our team members and it was decreasing our competitiveness and backstabbing. I am sure this tool will return us back to the norm in no time!

The email, for the curious:

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Hi there,

Someone anonymously wanted to let you know that you send WAY too many emails ️

And you know... that's not great...

Being that guy (or gal) is rarely a good thing, so here are 3 things you can do:

   1. Tag someone else you work with who sends too many emails to pass the blame and ease 
   your conscience at minimize.email.

   2. Consider Twist or Basecamp for deeper, calmer, and more meaningful work.
   
   3. If you absolutely must write an email, write a process-centric one.

Be well and don't forget to tag a colleague!

You received this email because someone nominated you on Minimize Email.

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Interesting theory, in order to reduce the amount of e-mails you let the culprit know via e-mail, additionally suggesting him/her to use the service to nominate more people (thus sending each another e-mail).

There is something perverse about it that I like.

Don't forget the two other pieces of advice: using centralized services like Twist or Basecamp, which I suspect want you to use their own specific crappy user interface, or writing a "process-centric" email, whatever that may be.

Is there a twilio script I can use to robodial people that leave me too much voice mail?

This is lame. Is this site is basically trying to harvest emails for SPAM?

"Instead of utilizing the standardized protocol of email, lock yourself into a proprietary project management tool."

How is this supposed to be compelling?

And would the recipient of such an email be in a position to decide "I am going to use [a new project management tool] in order to effect [marketing slogan]"? It seems unlikely that anyone with the authority to make that decision would find themselves on the receiving end of this.

What's the end game behind this service? Is it simply email harvesting? An attempt at an underground/"viral" marketing campaign?

I can't imagine how hard I'd roll my eyes if I got one of these emails. This reads like a chain letter.

"Copy this letter and send it to five other people in your company, or suffer the wrath of The Mummy's Curse."

I don't get it. This subject is not so uncomfortable to discuss if you have some tact.

I'm not sure anonymous email is a solution for subjects that are hard to discuss either.

I once had to have a body odor discussion with an employee. I don't think an email would have been helpful there either.

Everyone tried this out on themselves first, right? So at worst this could be a good way to harvest emails of HN readers.

Disclosure: actually I didn't try it

Just try on something like http://www.yopmail.com/ or https://www.mailinator.com/

I was going to but I figured I'd check back in this thread. Someone already posted the email.

What a great way to demoralize your colleagues instead of simply talking to them.

I have been using email since 1987 and have never seen anyone who sends too much legitimate email. (Spammers don't count. People who like to Reply All to All-Company lists don't count.)

Where is this a problem?

Oh geez, oh wow, I'm glad you have never run into this problem.

One of my coworkers decided to work from home today, and they decided it would be best to send updates by email addressing whether or not they were physically at their computer at a given time. Out of the 10 emails I have received from them today, only one of them has addressed something actionable.

What if your manager does not see eye to eye with you, and happen to like others in the team sending too many emails? Ouch!

Sometimes too many emails gets the job done. It is a matter of perspective, subjectivity, and diversity of opinions. One can't force everyone to follow a unified platform of Basecamp, Slack, etc.

Wow, so, what if you are the only person they are inundating with email? What if you are the only one and do not even know it?

Anonymity is not as sure a thing as many people seem to think especially for complaining about something so specific. You are presumably already identifying yourself as a coworker at the place of employment or whatever.

I mean, if you don't have the social skills to let someone know nicely and effectively that communication needs to be handled more efficiently somehow, then you probably aren't as clever as you think when you hit "send" on something like this either.

I remember an anonymous survey at BigCo where answers were so specific, they had trouble trying to share it with the bosses it was intended to go to because even without names, the details would make it clear who was complaining about you.

Good point in general, but in many scenarios you can easily know that you are not the only person, e.g. if someone loves CC-ing way to many people or sends tons of stuff to lists. Still kind of weird way of doing it...

There may be ways to know for sure that you aren't the only one, but there is quite a lot of one-sided information in the world and the internet tends to be bad about this. Many people seem unaware of the possibility that maybe something was lost in cyberspace, so if you don't get a reply or read receipt of some kind, it is not unreasonable to send a follow up email and inquire.

I tend to send replies to make sure people know that I got their thing, but I have had to reign that in over time because it goes weird places socially. We really have not done a good job in the online world of finding a way to confirm that two-way communication has happened. In person, you generally are going to have a good idea if they heard you or not. Online, it can be pretty difficult to determine.

And then two different people doing the exact same thing can get interpreted vastly differently.

That doesn't make excessive emails less aggravating, but online communication is far harder to do well than many people seem to realize. This anonymous chewing out is not a good faith means to resolve anything.

A form on the open Internet that sends to arbitrary e-mails is a bad idea. The only thing that would make this worse would be a field for specifying the body.

If you know any spam honeypot ("spamtrap") addresses, please feed them to this thing.

I'm pretty sure this mail would end up in the spam filter of my company.

Would be nice to know what this does without trying it with your own email address. I didn't see anything to click on other than submit, or is there?

You just need to find the "everyone@yourcompany.com" list and use that for an exciting "Please take me off your list" mega-thread.

Does it also send it in Comic Sans for true office passive aggression effect? Just go talk to them face to face.

I should send this to everyone at my company to minimize emails in general.

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