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Ask HN: Could you limit all or most emails to five sentences?

2 points by muhamm ↗ HN
Because of the screen limitations of the Blackberry and iPhone and the deluge of email most people receive, is it feasible to set a hard limit on the length of your emails or would your boss or coworkers give you a hard time?

I would like to adopt this policy, informing people by way of an email signature that all of my responses will be under 5 sentences, but am not sure how it's going to go down in a professional setting.

Has anyone tried this?

Did people give you a hard time?

http://five.sentenc.es/

3 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 15.0 ms ] thread
tvon
Most business emails I receive are under five sentences, easy (and by 'most' I mean 'probably 95%'). People generally don't like typing, so the ones that are long are usually long for a reason.

I also don't see screen size being an issue, at least I read a lot of multi-page content with the iPhone and it hasn't bothered me at all.

Besides, what you propose would discourage inline responses (you know, when someone asks a few questions, you respond in context, under the question), and I for one think not enough people respond inline when it's appropriate.

anigbrowl
If only more people would reply inline! It's the one huge downside of graphic email, most people never acquired the habit of line quote/answer.

I find it incredibly rude to get a 200k email where I have to keep scrolling up and down to older stuff to see what's being referred to, when inline quoting would be so much more efficient. the worst demographic are older (>35) users who came to email late. Younger people are more succinct and early adopters of email are still efficient.

Oh well, get off my lawn.

[dead] ram1024
internally sure, people will get used to it.

outward facing like customer care it'll never fly of course :D

i'm all for people just getting to the damn point. i find it to actually make the person more likeable if he can tell me what the hell the deal is short and sweet without leaving out critical details.