After being on the receiving end of a recent mass-emailing, I got into a discussion with a good friend of mine about mass-email etiquette. YouAreYou's comment to this was: "How quaint!" It does seem a bit quaint to have an email etiquette conversation; after all, everyone is claiming email is old-school. But I soon realized that my reluctance over being included on a mass-email was actually fairly modern:
With Gmail, the other people on the email will end up in your contact list. That causes trouble when you use sites that scan your contacts for friends (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) or when Gchat updates your buddy list. You end up having all these people in your contact and buddy list that you don't actually know.
Of course I also feel a little hesitant when people I don't know have my email. Who knows how careful strangers are with their data?
However, my biggest beef with mass-emailing is actually pretty old-school: Snarky comments, inside jokes, people trying to be funny...who wants to get tangled in a reply-all thread like that?
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You're right about the modern context, but just for the record I dusted off a first edition copy of the Book of Netiquette, and it says: "If you still feel the compulsion to 'reply all' to a mass emailing, we suggest that you get yourself what is being called a 'web log', or a forum in which you can express your thoughts and ideas publicly, allowing those among your friends who actually *want* to read your snarky comments to find you."
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