My teacher doesn’t know any email etiquette

My teacher Bill (last name above — I don’t want to write it together in case he ever Google’s himself and finds this page) is so obnoxious with his emails throughout the week that I’ve actually created an entire filter JUST for his emails. I hate it. He emails THE ENTIRE CLASS with multiple emails arriving within minutes of each other.

He could easily consolidate his weekly emails to maybe 1 or even 2. Instead, he sends anywhere between 4-6 emails a week, each incredibly repetitive and each more boring than the next. I’m saving these emails to read to my kids when they need a bed time story in the future.

He copies entire articles from beginning to end in each email. I would personally prefer that he just link to the articles online. I would like links instead of pasted articles for several reasons. Let me list them:

• Formatting - When he copies and pastes articles in the emails, the formatting is totally lost. Bolds become unbolded, block quotes are missing, italicized text becomes normal, and it just plain looks ugly. The sites that these articles come from usually have some sort of minimal text and body styling so as to make each article a bit more comprehendable and to increase readability. My teacher Bill totally loses all of this — every time.
• Context and miscellaneous information - Basically, where are these articles from?! His emails rarely ever contain this information. It’d be nice to know where he’s pulling these articles and long excerpts from.
• Consolidation and easy access - Having all of one week’s article links in one email will greatly help him consolidate his emails and make his articles for particular weeks easier to find. Simply naming the subject of the email with the article title is not enough!

I really just wish he would change his emailing habits. It’s worse enough already that I have to sit through his incredibly drawn out lectures each week for 2 hours and 40 minutes. These emails just aren’t making my life any more fun or exciting.

Maybe I should send him an anonymous email through Sharpmail and tell him all this stuff.

On a somewhat related note, I’ve realized that many Gmail users do not make use of Gmail’s innovative email features — specifically ‘labels’ and the ‘archive’ feature. Instead, many Gmail users I’ve observed still use Gmail like any other online email client (Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail or AOL Mail).
Gmail is smart and you are too if you use it. Maybe you just need to learn how to use some of its features. These Gmail tips from Jim Barr might be of some use (there are a lot there). If you’re using Gmail, try to stop thinking in terms of prehistoric email times when you still had to use ‘folders’. Hopefully, with some help, we can all get beyond that someday.