Getting the point across, short and sweet

In a busy world, keeping e-mails short and uncluttered with personal information is a quick way to ensure they are read

I love the notion discussed in a recent Wall Street Journal article, The Rise of MeMail, that tells how people are personalising their e-mail messages with distinctive signature caricatures (avatars), videos, photos and logos.

I have seen e-mails that even link to the sender's favourite charity.

Under different circumstances, it would be fun to receive notes with such distinctive features.

However, we live in a world where some of us get hundreds of messages a day and where corporate mailbox monitors threaten to pull the plug if we do not get the size of our inboxes under control.

Thrilling but unwelcome
So my advice for new job hunters is to compare this to sending a Boston cream pie to someone on a baked potato diet - it is a thrill to receive, but unwelcome in the long run.

Why not stick to just text, unless, of course, you are networking with people in fields such as marketing or graphics design, who, presumably, have enhanced storage space to very easily accommodate these super-sized messages.

I have been trying to get this across, too, to those who send me e-mails pitching story ideas. Because when I get one of those ominous warnings that my inbox is over the limit, my first step is to arrange the messages in order of size.

And those gigantic ones that I might otherwise keep to mull over are the first to hit the trash can.