During lunch with a client yesterday the topic of good manners in business email correspondence came up.

Apparently the offending email sender was starting off the email message with:

Hi,

topic at hand

rather than:

Hi Fiona,

topic at hand

In the end we agreed that emails are probably a bit more personal than letters (particularly when the letters are being sent on company letterheads), so in most cases the following would probably be too stiff and formal:

Dear Fiona,

topic at hand

but felt that it was still important to include the person's name in the opening salutation.

And then as fate would have it this morning I was led to an article on the subject - Disruptions: Digital Era Redefining Etiquette, which kicks off as follows:

Some people are so rude. Really, who sends an e-mail or text message that just says “Thank you”? Who leaves a voice mail message when you don’t answer, rather than texting you? Who asks for a fact easily found on Google?

Don’t these people realize that they’re wasting your time?

What was once normal can be seen as uncivilized — like asking someone for directions when such information can easily be found on Google Maps.
The whole article is worth the read, and as someone who gets a pretty heavy stream of digital media arriving in my inbox or on my cellphone, at first I was nodding my head with the points made.

But you know, after a little thought...

Am I being old fashioned when I think as fast paced as life is nowadays, we still need to keep some courtesy in our communication, and make a little room in our world to accept a simple "thank you"?