Society
Is it bad manners to reply to someone's e-mail without deleting the original message?
Published 16 October 2000
The phone rings, you answer it, and a voice at the other end says: "Hello? Who is that?" So you say something like: "But you're the one making the call. Who are you calling?" "I don't know. That's what I'm trying to find out." "But if you don't know who I am, how could you call me?"
After a complicated discussion, what emerges is that someone, who may or may not be you, has called their phone, but it wasn't answered. If they have a mobile phone, the number has been stored; otherwise, they may have found out by dialling 1471. They find a baffling phone number, and the only way of discovering to whom it belongs is to ring and ask.
Actually, in this new age of digitised information, it isn't the only way. An old-fashioned telephone directory can only be used in one way; you can't look up a telephone number and find out who it belongs to. But with, say, a personal organiser or one of the new CD-Rom directories, you can look up anything you like. In fact, there's a website where you can punch in anybody's name, plus the town where they live - and I mean anybody, even famous people with unlisted phone numbers - and you get their full address and even an aerial photograph of their house. I'm not sure what the ostensible purpose of the website is, but it is especially useful if you are planning to murder a celebrity.
To get back to my phone problem: each advance in the communication revolution creates new areas of etiquette to worry about. We have not yet decided whether there is any obligation on us to leave a message on an answering machine, and now there's e-mail, mobile phones, pagers, and things like callback and voicemail. When new forms of communication are invented, it is just about itself. Communication never gets much beyond: "Are you there?" "Yes, I'm here?" "Can you hear me?" "Yes, I can hear you."
But once you start using it properly, rules and manners develop that partly derive from the technology that is being superseded. For example, is it bad manners if, when somebody replies to your e-mail, they fail to delete the message you sent them? It irritates me, but I wonder if that is partly because there is something genuinely insulting if you write someone a letter and they reply by sending your letter back with a comment scrawled on it.
On the other hand, it is equally irritating when you get an e-mail that reads, in full: "Absolutely. But I'm not sure about your second point." And you have to find your original message to see what on earth the message means.
One of the big rules about e-mail is that you never know exactly who will be reading your message. Some people say you should imagine your e-mail as a postcard. That's not enough. I think you should imagine it as a placard that people are going to carry around the house or office where it was received. Which means: beware of messages of the "I had an interesting dream about you last night" type.
And should one make some attempt to spell correctly or use capital letters in the right places? When you write to people in offices, you tend to get this sort of reply: "aLrigt, il se you tOmoro abut nne oclcK/" - which reads like one of those messages you used to see on the Tube that said: "If you cn rd ths msg u cn b a secry an ern lts f mny". The point is to show how much busier the sender is than you.
It is dangerously easy to copy your e-mails to anybody that comes into your head. The best rule about this that I've heard is that if your cc list is regularly longer than your message, you've got a problem.
With technology, one form of rudeness can be transformed into another. In the past, when I dialled a wrong number I just used to hang up as soon as I realised what I'd done. What was the point in explaining the situation to anyone I'd called by mistake? As I've discovered, if you do that now, the person tends to call 1471, and ring you back to ask what you wanted. This has made obsolete that famous injunction to the one you're having an affair with: "If a woman answers, hang up." Unless you withhold your number, of course. And does it follow from this that it is bad manners to withhold your number? When I dial 1471, I get spooked when that creepy dominatrix tells me that the caller withheld their number. Was it a burglar seeing if I was home? A stalker? Someone planning a dirty phone-call?
So if you answer the phone and someone says: "Who's that?", just say: "It's me" - then hang up. If you've a better idea, you can let me know on seanicci@dircon.co.uk.
But don't write to tell me that you're on the train. I don't want to know.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by using the 'report this comment' facility or by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
