So how come...

[johnridley]

Why do people put lines at the bottoms of their emails saying what device they sent their messages from? Is there some reason I need to know, or are they just bragging about their new toys? I've been seeing "sent from my Blackberry" for a while, just now I saw "Sent from my iPad."

This message was sent from my Windows XP box, service pack 3, FireFox 3.6.8. Just in case you needed to know that.

Comments

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

We're not talking about free email here. Not at all. We're talking about mobile devices.

Even in the context of free email, GMail doesn't do this crap. OK, they're feeding me context-based ads (or they would be if I weren't blocking them). And it's possible they're aggregating data to sell, but I think it'd be silly to think everyone else isn't doing that as well.

I suppose that as an excuse for not taking the time to put together a proper response, the mobile device sigs are somewhat sensible. But really, what I would prefer would be that people wait a few hours or a day until they're back at a real computer. I don't think I've ever gotten an email with one of these sigs on it that couldn't wait for a day. My experience has been that people who answer emails quickly on mobile devices usually don't do a very good job; they didn't read the question, or they give answers so terse as to be useless and require a follow-up email anyway.

[tlunquist.livejournal.com]

I was referring specifically to " it really bugs me when people are using some kind of free email service and it puts multiple sentence advertisements after every one of their emails," although your point about GMail is valid. I agree that mobile device email is not free and thus should not involve non-optional advertising. My iPhone doesn't require that I tell the world I've sent email from it. I don't really mind doing so and haven't bothered to change the .sig, but now that I know it's causing serious stress in your life, I'll make a point... of never sending you email from my iPhone. ;-)

What if I *like* my iPhone and derive a sort of perverse pleasure from being a member of the iPhone club? Am I within my rights to choose to trumpet my iPhone's existence to sundry recipients of my email, or are so many people losing sleep over this that it is my duty as a geek to spare them that eyeball-searing "Brand Moment"?*

*I trust you can tell that I write this with tongue firmly in cheek, but this footnote just in case the "sarcasm font" doesn't display properly

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

That's alright. Outside of work, spam and the mailing lists I belong to, I don't think I get more than 5 or 6 emails a month from everyone in the world combined (and those are people looking for information or reminding me of a meeting or something), so it's not a big deal.

I think the REASON it bugs me when free email providers do this is that GMail doesn't do it.

"This message was typed on an actual computer. Any typos are because I screwed up, any terseness is because I just don't care."

:)