Join the Discussion "Should I print my emails?" ab_email

Related Resources • Why You Should Print Your Email Messages

Elsewhere on the Web • The Elements of Art

It's obvious.

You should not print your email messages.

To print something received by email (with the exception of some attachments perhaps) is like scanning a snail mail letter to read it on the monitor.

Would you demand that every new movie would be brought on stage in your town because going to the theater is an experience so different, so more "real"? Would you demand that films are but dramas performed on stage and put on film?

Form shapes and creates content. Sometimes it takes a while until new formats and technical possibilities are creatively exploited (sometimes -- or often? -- this never happens). Conversions between formats are interesting experiments, and maybe these conversions are formats themselves, but with every conversion something is lost.

When you print an email, you lose that email, and your reply will not be an email. Not only have you destroyed the format, you have destroyed the message with it.

Email messages are written to be read on the screen. They are written to be replied to on the screen. They are written to be read in a library where you're not allowed to access the Internet or in between Yahoo and The Motley Fool, written to be replied to with a clumsy email client in a teeny-tiny font. They are written to be treaded as emails.

If you print an email message, you take it out of its context. You will not understand it, and it will show.

"Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan."

Eliel Saarinen

bye,
-einz.

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