The art of middle-class emailing: starting your message in the subject line

What’s new in emailing? There’s a question you’d never thought to ask. But it matters. And I can report, because I’ve got a keen eye for these things, that subject headings are dead. Where once we would include a nice, neat little heading, almost like a document title, we now just plunge straight in with our message and continue it in the body of the email. 

Do you think it would be a good idea to
get together to go over the plan for July?

Sometimes we don’t even use the body at all, just pile the whole thing into the subject line. These developments come from the fact that we’re all using mixed media now – some texts, some tweets, maybe that BlackBerry messenger thing that seems so dreadfully teenage to me, and none of that stuff requires a title; you just start your message. Email’s subject heading is antiquated. This development is all very well but it doesn’t half make an inbox a bewildering place to be, full of messages that are impossible to organise and find. It was all so much tidier and easier in the days of ‘Subject: meeting about July’s workplan’, wasn’t it?