Every company on earth, every authority and agency and a lot of others think it is fine to simply send me letters to tell me something that could have been a simple one liner email.

Please don’t send me letters. Especially if it is just to say “We received your message and will process it now, thanks”.

Letters require space for storage, they need to be fetched from a letter box, opened, read, processed, sometimes a reaction is required. Then letters have to be stored somewhere, either physically or as a scan.

This just creates work where none is required. Send me emails.

Those are much simpler to process:

1. Read
2. Process
3. React if required

There’s no need to physically transport them, open them physically… even storing them happens automatically. No need to do anything.

I really do not enjoy spending two hours on a Sunday scanning mail. I could just take a walk instead, looking at the birds chirp. 🙂

Instead I spend my time scanning letters. Just because some organisation made the decision to send letters for what could have been an email. Why even ask for an email address if it is not used? And yes, I need to scan my mail to be able to search for letters and to make backups. I know how much I’ve scanned, I’d need a filing cabinet just to store that all. Instead I scan everything and if a document is something for which a scan will suffice, I’ll throw it away after scanning. Yes, that applies to everything I don’t actually have to keep, also for certificates I get alongside medals. There’s just no use for those. Neat gesture, waste of resources. I dislike medals for the same reason. If you give me one, please at least make it small, so I can easily store it somewhere. Because nobody ever talks about storing medals.

Also, please do not send emails with HTML. Or at least include the plain text as well. You know, emails can not only have a MIME type of text/html, they can also contain text/plain. Even both, this can let the user select what they want to see. Some large companies get this right, eBay does (mostly), Amazon does (still do not use them as they’re too large for my taste), German railway company Deutsche Bahn and others… I get that users often might prefer HTML, but I will not turn that on. I don’t want to load trackers or have my encryption compromised (German,
for an English source: have a look here). Not only can HTML in emails be an issue from privacy as well as a security stand point, plain text can also be easier to read than emails containing many elements, colours, images, buttons and bad formatting. Sometimes the colour schemes are so bad I could barely read an email containing HTML. There’s no such issue with plain text. I have set my colour scheme to something I find easy to read.

Encrypt your messages, if you’re able to. Use GPG. Thunderbird has built-in support. Use XMPP + OMEMO. Encrypt as much as possible, leave as little trace of personal data as you can.

To summarise: Send emails instead of letters (except when you need something more secure than an email), don’t force users to read emails in HTML by at least inclusing text/plain. And use encryption.