11/6/08

I don't care if your email is "Sent from my iPhone"

I don't get people who sign their emails "Sent from my iPhone." How is that information valuable to me in any way? Am I supposed to go: "Oooh...you sent it from your iPhone...well stop the fucking presses! Erase my entire inbox, I just received an email from an IPHONE."

It's usually a completely worthless email too. "Cool, see you then. Sent from my iPhone." Pointless. You know when you should sign your emails this way? When you're trapped somewhere. "The proposal looks good...Sent from the bottom of a mine shaft." Now that's something I should know. He's in the bottom of a mine shaft. I should send help. Now I know. Way to keep me informed.

Do these guys do this all the time? When they leave a voicemail, do they say, "OK, call me when you get this. Bye...I'm calling from my iPhone." When they give you a ride home, do they drop you off and say, "You just rode in my Cadillac."

And people who end their emails with a signature that has a philosophical quote should also calm down. "Be the change you want to see in the world." -Mahatma Gandhi. Yeah, that's the perfect way to conclude that "10 Ways to tell Santa is a Computer Nerd" email you just sent me.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

i think they come with that signature automatically in the phone but it is possible to change it...and obnoxious.

Matt Ruby said...

Yeah, you can turn it off. If you don't, you either 1) don't know how to use the damn thing or 2) want everyone to know that you've got a fancy phone. Either way is pretty lame.

Anonymous said...

I just changed mine to "Sent from my telegraph machine".

Luigi Montanez said...

This bit of douchiness started with the Blackberry earlier this decade. "Sent from my Blackberry". Apple just copied that.

zoblue said...

Huh, here I thought it was to let ppl know that the sender is mobile and not in the office.

/me goes off to change sig

Anonymous said...

Blackberry started this and I believe the original intent was to basically say "Hey, this email is gonna suck and I'm gonna shorthand the hell out of it and it may not be legible and/or intelligible." But now that shorthand is part of standard Internet parlance I don't think it's much necessary.

Sent from My MacBook.

mike3k said...

It tells the recipient that you're not at your desk and they most likely interrupted your lunch, so they should excuse you for a terse reply.

Matt Ruby said...

It tells the recipient that you're not at your desk and they most likely interrupted your lunch, so they should excuse you for a terse reply.

That may be the intention. But that really only matters a tiny percentage of the time. Meanwhile, the rest of the world just thinks you wanna show off your high-priced gadget.

Full disclosure: I have an iPhone. But the first thing I did was turn off that signature.

Anonymous said...

But it does matter some of the time. I only respond to email from my iPhone when an urgent response is required and those abrupt (and often typo filled) responses are very different than my typical email responses.

Having said that... I agree "Sent from my iPhone" is lame. I compromise with "Sent from a mobile device". For all they know, I could have sent it from a Razr.

Anonymous said...

The point is to tell the end to forgive any typos because mobile devices are notorious for mistakes and short replies. This allows the reader to put the response in context. I was gun-ho on it before but recently changed it to "sent from my mobile device, so sorry about the typos" I thought I would just hit the user over the head with a 2x4.

Anonymous said...

this harks back to two things: blackberry standards, and also the lack of convergence of communications, a notion of days of old really. Needed this to tell people that you were connecting with them via some mobile 'other' device and so somehow, connectivity was different or should be considered hindered.
That is long gone and what we need people to automatically assume is that whatever medium/messenging communications method you're connecting across has no bearing on where you are or when you are or how you are reachable. You're connected from numerous devices, from numerous locations in a day, so it should matter if a message came from an iPhone or a disposable netbook from a vending machine in tokyo.

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