One of the many things that I dislike about automated emails is the amount of time that goes into creating the darn things. The messages are usually terribly generic and bordering on the absurd. Take Twitter's recent email campaigns for example. They make it sound like people have Tweets waiting for us to read when, in reality, it's quite different. The people mentioned merely Tweeted, and Twitter has compiled a list of high-attention remarks that will draw people into interacting.
Really? John Siracusa has Tweets for me? The John Siracusa? Somehow I find this hard to believe, as the man has no reason to know my name. There has to be a better way to put these automated emails together in such a way that it doesn't make the service sound like a Fisher-Price PlayZone where anybody and everybody is interacting with each other. Sure, it happens from time to time1, but it's not something that we can expect to see happen regularly.
Alas ... I should relax and add these emails to the auto-delete filter.
