Email Subject Lines

At the Ward Churchill event I wound up chatting with this bright CMU student named Heather. I was telling her about the nightmare which is the chair's email load. And in particular I was complaining, why can't people learn to use a simple subject line? I have one graduate student who for some reason never puts anything in the subject line. Most people use very vague or generic email subject lines which require you to then read the message. And then lots of people just hit reply to any old message. Some people will start a whole new issue up by replying to an old topic so that the subject line has no link to the body of the message. That's fine if you only are getting a handful of emails each day. But I get 100-200 per day. If the subject line is clear, I can more quickly decide how to handle a message. Or to ignore it. I suppose a vague subject line forces me to look at the email. But if the subject line is an old issue, I might think the message is unimportant when it really is critical. I suppose the larger problem is just that as chair I get too much email.