Email "Metanotification" - what you're saying without saying it...

John Tierney has a wholly worthwhile article in the New York Times on the "Metanotification" that exists in emails. That seven-syllable beast is just fancy word for the signals that you send to your email recipients by putting their email at the beginning of the "To:" list or the end of the "Cc:" list; by sending them a personal email or merely including them in a hundred-recipient distribution. The problem is that this metanotification is usually unintentional and unknown to the sender - but often noticed vested with unjustified meaning by the readers. For example, Hatfield didn't mean anything when he put his best friend McCoy's email second-to-last on the "To:" line for his upcoming hoedown. But Hatfield noticed it, and couldn't help feeling less important than all those other yokels who "done got invited afore me." And look what happened...

Anyway, the cause of this problem is the combination of (1) a system which allows metanotification to exist, but (2) doesn't cue users to consciously consider it. Change either of these, and a lot of bad blood could be avoided! Some examples:

1) Remove the metanotification: Imagine a plugin for your email client which caused all the recipients' email addresses to be placed in the "To:" line, rearranged into alphabetical order, and the "To:" tag itself changed to "To (in alphabetical order):" No question about why you're first or last anymore!

2) Cue users to consider metanotification: A little more annoying, but this could take the form fof a pop-up warning in between hitting Send and actually sending, where the sender is instructed to consciously and properly adjust the order and To/Cc locations of all the addresses. These kinds of warnings never work, of course - they're ignored and become useless annoyances, but that's another post for another time!