There, I said it. It is anti-productivity. Period.

this can work great, as long as the recipients browser doesnt cut off the subject line! – ex: good for in-work, full screen recipients.

BUT-more and more people use iphones, blackberrys, droids, to check mail, even whern thy have a full screen at their deck with the same account!!!

….so be sure you keep messages within the browsers subject line preview character length, and they can actually >SEE< (END) typed! …or it will actually be a WASTE of time!

Sending a subject-only email really doesn’t save time for the reader. It is an outdated idea whose demise cannot come quickly enough.

If you work in a high stress environment, and you get a subject only email from a demanding SOB, all you want to do is print it out and jamb it down his conceited, arrogant, pontificating throat.

It–™s not about technology nor time savings. It–™s about common office courtesy. I am a human being, not a machine. Speak to me as a person, and email me as a co-worker. Save your text messages for your cell phone.

If your message is so brief as to not warrant content, maybe it lacks any real value in the first place. Why respond at all? Why not pick up the phone or just keep your mouth shut.

Have fun with your 15 seconds. Use it to work on a personality.

15 seconds is a small price to pay for a short sweet friendly body although I acknowledge that 15 seconds per email adds up.

If you have the opportunity to communicate with people, seize that opporunity to better your relationships, or communication skills. Just don’t write an essay.

Personally, I’d look for the holes in my process where I’m losing the pound, not the penny.

Many of the things you are disagreeing about have to do with differences in what email program you use. If you use programs that preview, yeah, it’s not much of a total time savings — you eventually have to select the message, if only to delete it.

However, there are some email programs that don’t preview. The extreme is the text-based email programs (which show all the headers, making it easy to lose the subject line), but also Web-based email programs (Yahoo, SquirrelMail, etc) tend to have no (or very limited) previewing.

Note that even to preview, you have to select the message. One really nice thing about putting a lot of information in the subject line is that people can take it all in one glance at the inbox, without even touching the mouse or keyboard.

Descriptive subject lines are thus almost always a Good Thing, even if it isn’t a one-line sentence. Subject lines aren’t always easy to write. I advise people to pretend they are walking up to someone and saying, “Hey, I wanted to talk to you about…”. Whatever finishes the sentence usually makes a good subject line.

(Because they can be taken in at a glance, one-line subject messages are particularly good for urgent messages like “Belligerent drunk out back, exit via front! [EOM]“.)

About length — unless you know exactly how your correspondents’ email programs and spam filters are going to treat your subject lines, I would be very very very cautious about making the subject lines too long. I’ve seen a lot of spam that had very long subject lines for reasons I’m not going to go into here; many email programs don’t have the ability to show more than about 80 characters in the subject line.

I frequently use single-line messages, with “EOM”, but I always take a second to copy the entire subject line and paste it into the body. That takes about .5 seconds, bypasses filters that don’t like empty messages, and make it less confusing for people who page through messages without really reading the subject lines.