You know, I fail to understand how something as utterly simple as the phenomenon of eMail can be
botched by so damned many people.
What. The. Hell?
I mean, lets be honest here, we are taught (at least most of us) to read and write at a fairly
young age. By ten we are fully capable of rendering our thoughts into a text medium, handwritten
in school notebooks and, for the girls out there, undoubtedly copious diaries stashed under
mattresses the world over. Especially in this day and age we are also taught how to use computers,
typing is, apparently, taught in many US high schools (it sure wasn't in any of the New Zealand
schools I know of, but I guess that it's only fitting the US education system is shaping their
future to be truly adequate secretaries, and apparently little else).
So, then, how are so many millions of internet users completely incompetant when it comes to
the very basic procedure of sending an eMail?

And it's not fair to only pick on the younger generation. Because a vast proportion of the daily
drivel I end up wading through is produced by people of Baby Boomer gen, and their later compatriots,
the gen-X'ers.
What is wrong with you people?
You seem to be the last generation of people that truly had a handle on penmanship, the act of
writing letters (you know, the ones that go by postal carrier and have a stamp on them) by hand,
and yet miraculously seem to completely lose the ability to form comprehendable sentences and
produce flowing trains of thought in a text document.

As someone who corresponds with the world most largely by eMail I have to say I experience an awful
lot of serious ineptitude that makes me question the intelligence of the people behind their
keyboards. Let us discuss your inner retard, shall we?

AN EMAIL SHOULD NOT BE IN ALL CAPITALS. Computers have had mixed case character sets since the
70s, ignoring cheaper microcomputers like the Commodore-64s. Use them for the love of God.
Speaking as a man who has spent over a decade on internet chatters (Long before the existance of
this repugnant Instant Messenger plague) seeing an eMail like this is immediately interpreted as
the other person yelling at me. Would you call someone and spend ten minutes yelling at them
down the phone? Of course not. Don't do it to me via eMail, you cretin.

Your eMail client indents replies by itself. This would be that nifty little > character you
see that pokes all the previous eMail content over. This way I can see what I wrote to you
before you replied to me. This is useful. This helps me understand the context of a reply.
Deleting it all is bloody irritating. Stop doing it. Not to mention replying above the context.
sentences like this?
Do you write
Of course not. Then why in the hell would you reply to eMail like that?

eMail is an inherantly reliable medium. When you send it, it gets through to the other end, unless
there is an unbelievable catastrophe on the internet (which, you know, hasn't happened since
the Morris worm in the 1980s) or you botched something. The marvelous thing about eMail is that
when you botch something you get a fantastic little reply called a bounce, which tells
you how much of a nimrod you are.
Unless you see a bounce, the eMail almost certainly got through. Do not call me to find out. If
you were going to call me, why in the hell would you send a single line eMail in the first place?
Alright. So this isn't as true as it used to be. Thanks to commercial conglomerate ISPs who filter your
eMail and determine for you what you should see by deciding whether they think it's spam or not sometimes a valid mail does not go through and returns no bounce.
Well that's just too damned bad. That's the other person's fault for subscribing to a shite
ISP. If they're that moronic, they're not worth talking to in the first place. Move on with
your life.

So much has been written about never ending eMail forwards that I hardly can think of anything new
to say about them.
Don't be a pathetic, conforming little toady of the internet phlegm known as a Forwarder. Let
it end at you. Don't send it on. No one gives a shit, and we've all seen it before.

Although while we're on the subject of forwarding, how about you learn to trim your eMail. There's
simply nothing I love more than receiving an eMail with the one line:
Hey, everyonez, go to this website - it's hilarious:
And then there's seventy eight pages of the forward spam from the six hundred other people that
this mail bopped through. I mean, if it really is something you think is worth forwarding, and
you're so damned stupid you think I haven't seen it before, the least you could do is make it so
that I don't have to hunt through three quarters of the daffy eMail to find the bloody URI.
This isn't a treasure map, and I can guarantee you after five minutes of wading through all
those six hundred other people's eMail addresses (and their inevitably lame responses like
"ROTFLMAO!!!!1!1!11!!") that whatever the hell you're sending me to simply isn't funny enough to
stop me from mailing you back and telling you what kind of mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging
troglodyte you are.

How about those charming little bastards on cable that send eMails to people with attachments
the size of Malta? What is wrong with you? What makes you think that everyone else on the planet
has cable? Or are you simply spiting everyone else because you decided to cough up the dough and
get broadband - and are fortunate enough to live in an area that services broadband.
Die in a fire. Some of us don't have broadband and downloading a seven Megabyte eMail you sent
with some video of a dog dancing with a baby is such a thorough waste of our time it would almost
be easier to drive to your house and slay you ritually with a rusted billy stick (which you
so rightly deserve, by the way) to make certain we never have to suffer your stupidity ever again.
Oh, and while we're on the matter, people learn to resize your goddamned images. No, I don't plan
on ever printing a high-resolution photo of your bloody gerbil, so why in buggery are you sending me three two Meg
images of it in some ungodly resolution that I can't even fit on my son of a bitching monitor
any damned way. I don't give a toss if it takes you a few precious seconds to resize a couple of images,
stop being a jack ass and making half of the people on your forward list suffer for your damned
laziness. You're working a mouse across an eight inch pad, not a boulder up a hill, you can do it, you useless shit.

What's with the inability to type complete words anymore. Wht the fck is ths?
Unless you are retarded enough to be using your damned cellphone as an internet appliance (and
anyone that stupid deserves to have their thumbs removed, the pretentious twats) you
can spend the extra eighth of a second to type in those missing vowels. Yes, you can do it.
Unless you type using your nose, it simply is not that much of an inconvenience and time saver
that it makes it worth my not being able to understand what the fuck you're asking me.
If you want something from me, and you seriously expect me to spend my valuable time reading
your eMail it had better be bloody coherant.
My voip acct is nt wrking. plz fix.
How about I shove one of your hands up your arse and give you a reason to need to type like that?

Take it from me, people, it's real simple.
Full sentences. Capitals at the beginning of each sentence. Punctuation marks scattered about
for coherancy. You can do it, it just doesn't take that much extra time to do. Make my life
a little easier, so instead of having to invoke six dictionaries and a programme that does
spell-check suggestions I can quickly understand precisely what you want and respond without
the need for keyboard blistering obscenities. Please?