my company is sending everyone on a course to learn how to use e-mail properly

And looking down the list of my fellow attendees, I guess I shouldn't be too surprised to see that most of them work in IT.

ailsa, rofl, i prefer no capitals AT ALL. oops.

Unless you are my colleague.

How did they send out the notice? Was it email? If so, they probably already know how to use it, you'll figure this out in ten minutes, and then you can get down to some serious drinking.

The course is being run by somebody outside the company (a Using E-Mail Properly Consultant, one assumes) so presumbaly it is costing a lot to send us and they could've spent the money on something else, like HIGHER WAGES or something.

the maddening questionnaire I had to fill in last week when I got my Reminder E-mail (flagged for follow up, there's no escape, people) asked "How many e-mails do you have in your inbox?" as the first question. From ppl who've been on the course previously, I know that the first thing they ask you is to read out the answer to this in front of the 'class' and so I deleted a few non-essential things to whittle the total down to 77 from 122 and filled in 77.

Somewhat worryingly perhaps, the form had one of those sets of boxes where you are supposed to fill in one digit per box (à la for yr credit card no. when buying stuff) and there were FIVE BOXES next to the question!

(I'm waiting until they ask me for it, which probably means I'll never have to)

We are, apparently, receiving some Blackberries to test - it keeps getting delayed whilst the company supplying them and our mobile phone network argue over how to charge us for calls from them. I'm betting that I'm not senior enough to get one, though.

Then the company's parent company starts running the show, forces everyone onto Exchange with Outlook and now we have to leave all our mail on the server... and whaddaya know, suddenly they're complaining about everyone's mailboxes being too large! (averages well over 100mb each).

Seeing as we have to keep biz-critical mail, we seemed to manage perfectly well before with our own mail clients and PCs and no one complanined. Now, the same people telling us to cut down do this by sending a 1mb PDF file or word doc to the entire company, via email.

Sigh.

one of the mailboxes on the server I have access to is a shared one all our team uses - it collects all the aliased mails we get as notifications from 3rd party resellers, from clients, from other telcos, all that jazz. We get a *ton* of the stuff and as its shared it cant just be deleted or archived onto one persons pc as everyone needs to see it. WTF do they think we'll do? I HATE OUTLOOK.

2 more weeks, 2 more weeks... 2 more weeks... *twitch*

(but then, our company is small enough for me to know which of the users are which in that way)

* in Lotus Notes, an *empty* email database file weighs 12Mb. Ouch.

i'm reduced to using my 100mb on our file server for my archive folders...

Sorry Mark, I'm sure you're a good boy when it comes to email, but I don't see they have much choice but to do blanket training.

I'm in favour of compulsary email training for anyone who ever sends me any. However, none of my work colleagues do - they just phone me, or if they're feeling particularly energetic, come down to my office.

(the people who work in the outer office just shout my name out when they want me)

Martin I kiss you, thats brilliant - I'm going to give it a try this morning and suggest it to others as well. You'd think the MIS team would have told us this already wouldnt you? Oh well...