Bring back e-mail etiquette

With an inbox plagued with off-target pitches and clogged with huge PDFs, our editor laments the state of electronic PR

On a recent working vacation out of the country, struggling to communicate with interview subjects and my editors via dial-up Internet, I groaned as Outlook indicated it was downloading a six megabyte e-mail.

Hoping the e-mail at least contained some photos of my new niece, I waited out the 45-minute download time—and was rewarded for my patience with a gigantic mug shot of some PR agency exec. Not quite my niece, unless she’s grown a goatee.

Fielding a few dozen daily e-mail pitches from PR people is part of the deal when you’re a working writer. But e-mail pitches aren’t the problem—it’s the messages that flout every accepted rule of etiquette when it comes to communicating via e-mail.

As PR professionals rely more and more on e-mail to breach the barricades set up by journalists (voicemail being about as useful as a semaphore flag), some of them seem to have turned into world-class spammers.