I daresay that I get over a hundred e-mail messages every day, and that doesn't count the messages I read on various message boards, such as the ones available at the FamilyHistory.com Web site. As a result, I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to cut down on how much e-mail I get. It's then that I think about how I wouldn't be getting nearly so much e-mail if other people gave a bit more thought to e-mail etiquette (especially the etiquette of using mailing lists).

Before the days of electronic mail, when you were sending off letters to other people, you knew exactly how many letters you were sending off. For each letter you sent, it cost you in terms of paper, envelopes, and stamps, not to mention the time it took to address the envelopes and stuff them. Even if you had the postal addresses of one hundred or five hundred other genealogy researchers who you knew to be researching the same surname, I doubt you would spend the time or money to send a postal letter to all of them, and even if you did, I seriously doubt that you'd do it more than once!

By comparison, electronic mailing lists are easy. The e-mail address of a mailing list isn't any harder to type than the e-mail address of a single individual. It doesn't cost you a cent more to send an e-mail message to a mailing list than it does to send one to another individual. It doesn't require any additional investment of time on your part. It doesn't matter if the mailing list has fifty subscribers, five hundred, or five thousand! Because it is so easy, it should not come as a surprise to any of us that so many people send e-mail messages to mailing lists with so little thought about what they are doing. They don't think about the subject line, and they don't think about the content.

So here's your e-mom talking: Think about the subject line. Don't waste anyone's time by sending out messages with insufficient subject lines. I actually get e-mail that has no subject line whatsoever! (Those people will undoubtedly spend the afterlife in a purgatorial public library where none of the books have titles on their spines.) On one of the surname mailing lists I subscribe to (let's pretend that it's the SMITH list), I actually got an e-mail message with a subject of "SMITH census." On opening the message, I found that the message was only about SMITHs in a particular county in a particular year! There was plenty of room to put the county, state, and year in the subject line. That was one more e-mail message I shouldn't have had to spend time opening in order to learn that I wasn't the least bit interested.

Here's your e-mom talking again: Think about the message content. Don't waste anyone else's time by sending a thank-you intended for one person to the entire list. I realize that I'm sounding ungrateful toward public gratitude, but when you get birthday presents, do you send copies of each of your thank-you notes to all of your other relatives and friends? Would you really be that eager to read a thank-you message written by Person X and intended for Person Y? You send a question to a surname mailing list because you don't know which of the subscribers might know the answer. Sometimes, but not always, you send the answer back to the mailing list because other subscribers might be interested too. But if it's not of potential interest to a large number of list subscribers, don't send it!

I'd be interested to hear about your own pet peeves regarding genealogy e-mail and mailing lists. But if you write me, be sure to use a good subject line, OK?

Drew Smith is an instructor with the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is also a regular contributor to the quarterly journal Genealogical Computing, where he writes the "Cybrarian" column (formerly known as "Infobahn"). He can be reached at drewsmith@aol.com.