I read all the e-mails that I get on my work account, but ignore and delete roughly 90 percent of the ones that I receive at home.
On my home computer, I have a personal e-mail account with Yahoo. The only messages I always open and read are from family members, friends, job search leads and DeVry University. However, I’m flooded with e-mails from Facebook, which are messages containing friend requests, notifications and gaming updates. I immediately send these to the trash heap because I can retrieve the same information by simply logging on to the social network. Plus, my home account is the target of both legitimate and not-so-legitimate sales pitches for credit cards, insurance plans, other online college degrees and a whole host of other items on which people are hoping to make a buck.
The e-mail subject line can make a big difference. Sometimes a properly-worded subject line will prompt me to open a message I’d normally cast off.
For example, I once received a message from some person locater service that had the subject line: “Joel Wells, we’ve found a friend of yours!”. This message was rejected after I found out that this service needed my credit card number to discover who it was.
My e-mail account at work, in contrast, gets messages from just one source: the company. The messages are from management, human resource personnel and other co-workers. They send information that’s work related (at least it’s supposed to be), and I take the time to read, or at least skim, it all.
Subject lines on work e-mails only affect the sequence in which I read them. However, they don’t have an effect on whether I read or skim the message since I open them all anyway.
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