One of the slides in my Information Overload lecture analyzes the root causes of sending useless email, and goes into the very human motivators stemming from mistrust in many corporate cultures. One of these is CYA – sending mail, or copying too many people on it, to cover one’s backside.

So in a recent lecture one of my audience, not being a native English speaker, raised her hand and asked what CYA meant. I translated it for her and explained how people might send mail to people who had no need for it merely to cover themselves from any objection. She immediately got it, but another attendee said he thought I had meant the CYA was for use in the subject line of the message, to indicate its true nature – like the other cues I advocate using: HOT, FYI, etc.

Obviously this is not going to happen; no one will specify that they’re sending a message for this reason. But one may dream… surely we could all benefit if it were customary and required for people who send useless mail to prefix the subject with cues like CYA, or USELESS, or BS, or DELETEME… indeed, as computers get ever more powerful, we could delegate adding the cues to the email server, based on semantic analysis of the message’s content. We already have tools analyzing messages for importance (like Gmail’s Priority Inbox, or ClearContext for Outlook); why can’t they analyze them for inconsiderate, useless content?

Oh well…