I have a friend who used to make fun of me for writing him email messages with a long subject. He claimed that the subject line already contained the entire content of the email. He, on the other hand, used to write me emails with a one-word subject, almost always “hi”. When I complained to him about this (not being able to locate his email by the subject) he started enumerating them (e.g. “hi1”, “hi2” and so on).
Now it turns out the subject-only emails can be an effective way to send a quick message without all the hassle of filling out a proper message body. (via Lifehacker)
The example in the link is very subjective – of course that in such a situation it is better to sum the whole email in the subject.
Few years ago I used to get emails with a really long subject that made no point for also having a body to the email. Gush, I should have kept them, you would have laughed your guts out.
Anyway, did those emails with ‘hi’ as a subject used to contain something like ‘Hi, How are you doing? What’s new?’ as a body? Cause, in my opinion, that would have made the subject just right. Or maybe he just saved energy because he knew that one day you would be able to search your emails for content very easily.
True, my mistake was that I did actually repeat the subject in the email body itself, which I shouldn’t have.
And those “hi” emails contained sometimes stuff that was not even related to “hi”. Oh, and I still have them :)