[rant] i hate email forwarding notes
You erroneously receive an email meant for someone else or another team. You forward it with the note:
“Hey xyz,
we received this but I think this is meant for you.
Kind regards,
Name”
or a variation thereof.
Sometimes, mails bounce around internally before responsibilities are clear, and it finally arrives in your mailbox - with 4-6 of these useless notes.
“Hey Katja, look at this and maybe forward to xyz.”
“Hello Ben, not for us. Maybe send to abc.”
“Dear Mr. Schmidt, we received this but it’s not in our jurisdiction. Please forward to the relevant parties.”
”Dear all, we just received this, please respond to the initial query.”
And I fucking hate this! Can’t we all agree to let this fossilized shit go?
It makes me scroll endlessly to get to the meat of it, passing by complete corporate diarrhea in the process.
I love forwarding without any of that, and you better believe there’s pearl clutching about that. I’m here to bust these bullshit excuses right now.
1. If I don’t have that note, how will I know what to do with it and why I got it?
Put your thinking cap on, read the email and deduct based on keywords why you got that email. If it is about ABC and you’re the ABC team, is it not clear what you are supposed to do? That you are supposed to treat it as if you had gotten it directly? If you had received it directly, it would also not include a handbook about your next steps!
Also, if you are not CC and are directly addressed in the mail body, it already shows you are expected to react to it and handle it, and aren’t just being notified. If just notifying, I would write an FYI note, but I did not. This weaponized incompetence just an excuse to delay working on it.
2. Without the note, I don’t know who sent it. Without that, I don’t even have a contact to direct questions about this toward.
This is the worst lie of them all. Did you receive that email from the nether, anonymously? There is an email address attached. You know who it was! You can respond back to that address, and in my specific case, we even have a team phone number you know that you can call, and we are at best 4 people, less if on vacation or sick. Getting in contact with someone on the team or the exact person who sent it isn’t hard.
Also: If there is any additional context needed or extra information I can give you, I would of course write the damn note. But I did not! Take the hint, what questions would you even ask me if this is clearly an errant email meant for you and your work, which I have zero knowledge about? Am I supposed to do your work for you or what?
3. It’s just nice 🥺
It’s not nice to scroll through 5 sections of this goddamn drivel to find out what the fuss is about and I feel stupid writing that note that just reaffirms what is already painfully obvious: that you are getting it because it’s your goddamn job. We are wasting each other’s time. If I read XYZ in the title and the body of the email, I don’t need you to explain to me “I send this to you because we are ABC team and you are responsible for XYZ!” Gee thanks, I almost forgot!
Same in the other direction. We receive this comment from this working group, now I am supposed to forward it saying “here’s the comment by the working group for you!” just echoing the original email content I am forwarding. It adds absolutely nothing new.
At least, if you really have to do your own little forwarding note dance for your peace of mind, delete the previous notes.
If in the specific case of needing to preserve the path this took so we all know what teams already received it and passed it on so we don’t send them that again, you can include a quick summary of that in there too - at least that would make it useful then. Deleting all that and just go “forwarding this to you because I think you’re responsible for this; teams A, B, and C previously received it but weren’t the correct recipient.” There you go!
I am so tired of the email etiquette of yesteryear. Rules like these are seemingly set in stone for no good reason by the same generation who will unironically write “……….” after every sentence.
Get a grip and do your job and stop trying to nitpick to waste time and pretend you got nothing to work with or are absolutely clueless about what “receiving an email” means.
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Published 02 Oct, 2025