Sifting through my post-long-weekend Team CSS-Tricks inbox, it reminds me why so many folks have a bad taste in their mouth about email. Your inbox can get so flooded with noise so quickly. By noise, I mean those emails that aren’t junk or spam, but are just so un-important that spending time on them feels like a waste. Here’s a list of ones I was hacking through this morning:
- Someone just typing gibberish into my form. Happens sometimes on a site about web design. They are probably “testing” the form.
- Someone wanting to translate an article into Chinese. I generally don’t reply to these as I have a published page about this they can find and I really don’t care what they do.
- Same thing; Russian.
- Please add me on Skype so we can talk about something. (No. I think that’s rude to assume I have a bunch of time for you with zero context.)
- I have this great article for you to publish! (No. It’s written like garbage and full of spam links.)
- We already translated an article of yours, here’s a link to it. (Uh, OK.)
- I have amazing opportunities for your site, please respond to me. (No.)
- More gibberish.
- Super technical question about image editing. (I have no particular expertise in this area and make clear on the contact form I don’t do personal technical support.)
- There is a typo in an article of yours. This one is actually quite welcome. It’s my mistake, I’d like to fix it. If it’s sort and sweet and has the URL and where is, awesome.
- I have a guest post to pitch. (Yay! Not at all noise!)
- Killer Infographic for your CBD Content from Vaping 360. (Sigh.)
This is what having an open contact form is like, at least for me. It’s mostly junk. But still, it doesn’t take that much time to deal with, and I like having an open door for legit people to get in touch.